WRCB
NBC television affiliate in Chattanooga
WRCB (channel 3), branded Local 3, is a television station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. The station's studios are located on Whitehall Road on Chattanooga's north side; its transmitter is located in the town of Walden on Signal Mountain.
WRCB began broadcasting on May 6, 1956, as WRGP-TV, the second TV station in Chattanooga. Originally owned by Ramon G. Patterson, it was an NBC affiliate from its launch. The Friendly Group purchased the station in 1959 and, as part of its renaming as Rust Craft Broadcasting, changed the call sign to WRCB on January 1, 1963. Under Rust Craft and Ziff-Davis, which acquired the Rust Craft group in 1979, the station remained in third place in local news ratings.
Sarkes Tarzian acquired WRCB in 1982. The station's news ratings saw a marked increase in the 1980s, propelled at first by the popularity of the syndicated game show Wheel of Fortune. For most of the time since the mid-1980s, WRCB and WTVC (channel 9) have competed for first place in local news viewership in Chattanooga.
History
When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its multi-year freeze on new television station applications in April 1952, Chattanooga was assigned two VHF television channels, 3 and 12, and several Chattanooga interests began considering filing for them.
“WRCB” enters the record as nBC television affiliate in Chattanooga. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WRCB, television and affiliate can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“WRCB” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, WRCB, television and affiliate provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14710276. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1959, 1963 and 1979.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “WRCB” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.