TV Station Culture Runs Deep

From the November 2025, TV Time Capsule and Central Illinois' On-Line Broadcast Museum:

It's easy to see that WDAN-TV wasn't serious about programming a successful TV station. It established a culture within ownership and a negative public impression of the station that would later become WICD-TV in the early 1960s, and continued as Channel 15 beginning in 1967, through ownership changes, and to today!

From the time that Plains Television and Milton Friedland chose to address the expansion of WICS by taking a cheap shortcut to include households of Champaign and, later, Danville within the reach of Channel 20. Unfortunately, putting a station in Champaign on Channel 33 that barely reaches 15 miles, omitting much of east central Illinois from receiving NBC programming in color (taking it away from WCIA and its secondary affiliation), was just the beginning. 

The simulcasting of WICS news, or the originating of a specially prepared Champaign version of local news from Springfield in the 1960s after WICD went full power on Channel 15 in 1967, continued the preferential treatment of the Springfield facility over the Champaign operation. There were genuine efforts to increase WICD's influence in East Central Illinois throughout the 1980s and the very late 1990s and early 2000s, but those efforts lacked consistency.

When WCIA's ownership changed around 2000 and Channel 3 dismissed key news personalities and management, creating a severe PR problem for WCIA, WICD could have benefited after its sale to Sinclair. Still, under Sinclair's stagnant ownership at the time, the opportunity to increase viewership wasn't pursued; instead, Sinclair diverted resources and personnel from WICD even further.

Some things never change. Despite the economic importance and size of the East Central Illinois and West Central Indiana coverage area Sinclair closed down the news operation at WICD, like they did at KDNL in St. Louis and other stations in Toledo, OH; Sioux City, IA,; Gainesville, FL;, Omaha, NE; Medord, OR; Columbia, SC; Flint/Saginaw, MI; Eureka, CA; Tallahassee, FL; Greensboro, NC; and reduced operations in a few others. Sinclair is where TV news goes to die. 

To take it even further, Sinclair made WICD a total 100% translator of WICS, Channel 20. Sinclair chose to eliminate any mention of "15" from all graphic representations, keeping NewsChannel 20 as the logo for both stations, even though viewers of WICD in East Central Illinois who watch NewsChannel 20 still tune to virtual channel 15 on their TVs! How difficult would it have been to put both 15 and 20 as part of the logo and use the ID as being "NewsChannel 15-20" or even "20-15?"

To see more about WDAN-TV and its future sister station, WCHU, Channel 33 in Champaign, and its future as a full-powered station on Channel 15, click here to begin tracing the history of the stations on Central Illinois' On-Line Broadcast Museum.