City Flint, Michigan Affiliations Defunct Last air date 1954 | Channels Analog: 16 Founded 1953 | |
Owner Trendle-Campbell Broadcasting Company | ||
WTAC-TV was a UHF TV station which was located in Flint, Michigan. It operated on channel 16 and went on the air on Thanksgiving Day of 1953. It was owned by the Trendle-Campbell Broadcasting Company which was a partnership of George W. Trendle (creator of The Lone Ranger) and H. Allen Campbell which also owned WTAC(AM) which is now WSNL in Flint. It was affiliated with ABC-TV and DuMont. The TV station went out of business less than a year later, in the middle of ABC's coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings, because too few TVs at the time were equipped to receive UHF channels. The broadcast tower was destroyed in an April 1956 Hudsonville-Standale tornado. The WTAC-TV studios became the WJRT-TV studios in 1958.
Today, the signal space for channel 16 is home to WSMH's digital signal, which remains on channel 16 after that station shut down its analog signal May 21, 2009, and following the nationwide analog television shutdown that took place June 12, 2009.