WNKY (channel 40) is a television station in Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States, affiliated with NBC and CBS. Owned by Marquee Broadcasting, the station maintains studios on Chestnut Street in downtown Bowling Green, and its transmitter is located on Pilot Knob near Smiths Grove along U.S. Route 68 and I-65.
History
Construction of the station
The FCC granted a construction permit for channel 40 on October 21, 1983, to CMM Communications of Crossville, Tennessee. In 1984, the construction permit was bought by local businessman John M. Cunningham of Crossville. In 1988, Bob Rodgers, president of Word Broadcasting of Louisville, purchased the construction permit about two years after he successfully launched upstart station WBNA in that city.
As an independent station
The newly-licensed station began broadcasting as WQQB on December 17, 1989. At its first sign-on, the outlet operated as a religious independent station airing an analog signal on UHF channel 40. Early on, it struggled in a small market used to all-VHF stations, where ABC affiliate WBKO (channel 13) was all but dominant in Bowling Green proper, while stations from Nashville and to a lesser extent, Louisville, were easily received either over-the-air or via cable and had equal loyalty that WQQB struggled to overcome. In the rush to come to air, it also had a poor overall signal that wasn't easily received and regular technical problems, along with little to no coverage on cable systems outside the immediate Bowling Green area, as revised must-carry rules would not come into effect for another three years. In 1990, Storer Communications (later Insight Communications, now Charter/Spectrum cable) became the first local cable system to carry the station, assigning it to cable channel 27, replacing WXMT (now WUXP-TV) from Nashville; that station would return to area cable systems by the time it became a UPN affiliate when that network launched in 1995.
As a Fox affiliate
In November 1991, Word Broadcasting Network sold WQQB to Southeastern Communications for $1 million. This came as Word Broadcasting president Bob Rodgers assumed additional duties as church pastor and his decision to concentrate solely on operating WBNA in terms of the company's media efforts. The sale was approved by the FCC the following month.
For WQQB's first few months under Southeastern ownership, it switched to a general entertainment format with a mixture of low-budget syndicated programming, like old movies, sitcoms, and cartoons; this was done in preparation of becoming a network affiliate.
On January 10, 1992, WQQB changed its call letters to WKNT. The station's studios were relocated from the Smiths Grove transmission facility and tower to a facility on Campbell Lane shortly after the callsign change. On April 1st of that year, the station became the area's first Fox network affiliate with the then-new on-air branding as Fox 40; an episode of The Simpsons was its first network program. Between the callsign change and the beginning of the station's Fox affiliation, Storer Communications moved the station to cable channel 7 on its lineup. The following year, WKNT installed a new antenna at its transmission tower.
During its time as a Fox station in the 1990s, WKNT broadcast select Southeastern Conference football games via Jefferson Pilot Sports until 2002 when WBKO started to air those games to go with JP Sports (later Lincoln Financial Sports, then Raycom Sports) SEC basketball broadcasts. From 1994 to 1997, the station also aired the controversial ABC drama NYPD Blue for its second, third and fourth seasons due to WBKO's refusal to air that program; the first season of that program never aired in the Bowling Green market. The program moved to WBKO on February 4, 1997, after the new television ratings system was introduced at the beginning of that year. Except on Saturday, WKNT also aired programming from the Shop at Home Network from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00a.m. until that network's closure in 2005. Despite being a Fox affiliate, UPN's syndicated program block Disney's One Too aired on the station from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. weekday mornings and from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. Sunday mornings to cover the children's educational programming requirements. It was the only UPN programming that was ever available in the Bowling Green market besides WBKO's broadcasts of the first season of Star Trek: Voyager in 1995; all other UPN programming was only receivable via WUXP-TV (now a MyNetworkTV affiliate) in Nashville, as the de facto UPN affiliate for Bowling Green.