WSVN

WSVN

Miami–Fort Lauderdale, Florida United States
City	Miami, Florida
Channels	Digital: 9 (VHF) Virtual: 7
Branding	WSVN 7; 7 News
Programming
Affiliations	7.1: Fox for others, see § Subchannels
Ownership
Owner	Sunbeam Television Corporation
History
First air date	July 29, 1956 (68 years ago) (1956-07-29)[a]
Former call signs	WCKT (1956–1983)
Former channel number(s)	Analog: 7 (VHF, 1956–2009) Digital: 8 (VHF, 2000–2009), 7 (VHF, 2009–2019)
Former affiliations	NBC (1956–1989)
Call sign meaning	Channel "Seven"[1]
Technical information[2]
Licensing authority	FCC
Facility ID	63840
ERP	158 kW
HAAT	307.1 m (1,008 ft)
Transmitter coordinates	25°58′1″N 80°12′42″W / 25.96694°N 80.21167°W / 25.96694; -80.21167
Links
Public license information	Public file LMS
Website	wsvn.com

WSVN (channel 7) is a television station in Miami, Florida, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. Serving as the flagship station of locally based Sunbeam Television, it has studios on the 79th Street Causeway in North Bay Village and a transmitter in Miami Gardens, Florida.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regards WSVN as having signed on for the first time on December 19, 1962, as WCKT under Sunbeam ownership. However, the station was the result of a long and contentious legal battle between Sunbeam and three other applicants for the channel 7 allocation in Miami. Biscayne Television Corporation, a three-way partnership including the publishers of the Miami News and Miami Herald signed on a previous WCKT on July 29, 1956, only to be stripped of its license due to ethics violations within the FCC and unethical behavior by its principals during the application process. Sunbeam purchased WCKT's assets and re-launched the station under a new license with uninterrupted service, while claiming the old WCKT's history as its own. The market's NBC affiliate since its inception, WCKT was renamed WSVN in 1983 and became an independent with Fox programming on January 1, 1989, after NBC's purchase of CBS affiliate WTVJ and CBS's purchase of Fox affiliate WCIX-TV initiated a major affiliation switch. With minimal advance preparation, WSVN relaunched their news department with an emphasis on tabloid journalism under Joel Cheatwood's direction, an unconventional decision initially pilloried by the local media but since been emulated and copied throughout the industry.

WSVN's newscasts have attracted national and international attention for aggressive and controversial content and have been credited as an inspiration for the launch of Fox News. One of the largest Fox affiliates not owned by the network, it was famously called "the future of television" by onetime Fox executive Lucie Salhany. Involved with Sunbeam from the company's beginnings until his death on July 26, 2020, chairman Edmund Ansin repeatedly refused offers to sell either WSVN or his Boston stations.

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