WBIR-TV
NBC affiliate in Knoxville, Tennessee
WBIR-TV (channel 10) is a television station in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group; Nexstar owns ABC affiliate WATE-TV (channel 6). WBIR-TV's studios are located on Bill Williams Avenue in Knoxville's Belle Morris section, and its transmitter is located on Sharp's Ridge in North Knoxville.
History
WBIR-TV signed on the air on August 12, 1956, as a CBS affiliate, taking that affiliation away from WTVK (channel 26, now WVLT-TV on channel 8). During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. WBIR-TV was originally owned by a consortium headed by J. Lindsay Nunn and his son, Gilmore Nunn, owners of WBIR radio (1240 AM, now WIFA; and FM 103.5, now WIMZ-FM). The station's call letters come from Jesse W. "Jay" Birdwell, who founded WBIR radio in 1941; Birdwell sold the AM radio station to the Nunns in 1944. The Nunns shared ownership with WBIR general manager John P. Hart; Knoxville residents Robert and Martha Ashe, and the Taft family of Cincinnati. The Nunn group beat out the much larger Scripps-Howard, owner of the Knoxville News-Sentinel and WNOX radio for the license to broadcast on channel 10. By this time, the Federal Communications Commission was increasingly wary about common ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets and preferred separation. Additionally, the Nunn group was majority-owned by local residents.
“WBIR-TV” enters the record as nBC affiliate in Knoxville, Tennessee. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WBIR-TV, affiliate and Knoxville can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“WBIR-TV” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, WBIR-TV, affiliate and Knoxville provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7947209. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1240, 1941 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “WBIR-TV” 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.