WUPL

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WUPL 54 is the UPN owned-and-operated station for the Greater New Orleans, Louisiana area. It is licensed to the New Orleans suburb of Slidell. CBS Corporation recently agreed to sell WUPL to Belo Corporation, owners of CBS affiliate WWL-TV; this is pending regulatory approval. Belo Corp. disclosed in February that it is being sued for reneging on a deal to buy the station from CBS Corp [link]. WUPL's transmitter is located in New Orleans.

History

The station signed on in June 1995 as the market's UPN affiliate. Along with UPN programming, the station runs a general entertainment format, offering vintage off-network sitcoms, talk shows, court shows, and other syndicated shows.

WUPL was sold to Cox Enterprises in 1997, which in turn sold the station to Paramount Stations Group, which made WUPL a UPN owned-and-operated station.

Viacom, Paramount Stations Group's parent company, merged with CBS in 2000. Despite Viacom's ownership of WUPL, the market's CBS affiliation remained on WWL-TV, the highest-rated television station in New Orleans and CBS' strongest affiliate for over 20 years. However, since early 2005, WUPL has been broadcasting CBS's The Early Show (which WWL-TV pre-empts).

Viacom briefly considered buying WWL-TV, thus creating a duopoly with WUPL. However, after Belo turned down Viacom's offer, Viacom decided instead to sell WUPL to Belo. WUPL and WWL-TV will become sister stations under Belo ownership, pending FCC approval. Until then, WUPL is one of two network O&O's in New Orleans (Tribune-owned WNOL is the other) for now.

On February 9, 2006, Viacom filed a law suit against Belo Corp. over the failure to close on the sale of WUPL. The deal was slated to close by the end of 2005, but skidded to a halt when Hurricane Katrina devastated the market in late August.

Future

On January 24, 2006, the UPN and WB networks announced they would merge. The newly combined network would be called The CW, the letters representing the first initial of its corporate parents CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. The merger would take effect on-the-air in September 2006, and current WB station WNOL was announced as the CW's New Orleans affiliate.

Even though the current lawsuit with Belo Corp provided some doubt, it was announced that WUPL would become an affiliate of My Network TV on July 12. Since NewsCorp owns Fox and MNTV, CBS Corporation, which tentatively ownes WUPL, originally relented on allowing any of its current UPN affiliates to affiliate with the new network because Newscorp's UPN stations (soon to be MNTV affiliates) were left out of the deal to affiliate with The CW.

External links

• [WUPL UPN New Orleans Homepage]
• [Query the FCC's TV station database for WUPL]
• [Query the FCC's TV station database for WBXN-CA]

.54 billion USD (2005) | Employees: Unknown at this time. | Stock Symbol: NYSE: [CBS] | Website: [www.cbscorporation.com]

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