WIAT (channel 42) is a television station in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, affiliated with CBS and owned by Nexstar Media Group. The station's studios are located on Golden Crest Drive atop Red Mountain, next to the American General candelabra tower it shares with several central Alabama broadcast outlets (near the southern edge of Birmingham). History Early history of UHF channel 42 in Birmingham The history of the UHF channel 42 allocation in the Birmingham market traces back to 1949, when the Birmingham News Company, owners of The Birmingham News and Birmingham Age-Herald newspapers, applied for a construction permit with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a television station license under the call letters WSGN-TV (for the "South's Greatest Newspaper"), which would have served as a sister station to radio station WSGN (610 AM, now WAGG; and 93.7 FM, now WDJC), owned by the News Southern Broadcasting subsidiary. The station partnered with The Voice of Alabama, Inc., owners of WAFM-TV (channel 13, later WABT and WAPI-TV, and now WVTM-TV), to construct a broadcast tower next to its newly completed studio facility on Red Mountain, adjacent to Vulcan Park; plans called for WSGN-TV to operate from the radio stations' Radio Park building. The application, however, faced multiple delays on its approval. The first such moratorium on the license approval resulted from a freeze on broadcast licenses that imposed by the FCC the previous summer; however Bascom Hopson, president and general manager of WSGN radio, requested an extension to the agency's consideration of the license. At one point, Southern tried to forge a deal with the owners of WCBI-TV in Columbus, Mississippi to forfeit its VHF channel 4 assignment in order to allow the allocation to be reassigned to Birmingham for use by the proposed station (the FCC reassigned the channel 4 frequency to Columbus in 1953, when WBRC-TV moved to channel 6 to alleviate signal interference issues with WSM-TV [now WSMV-TV] in Nashville). In 1954, months after the News decided to purchase WAFM-TV, Johnston Broadcasting – then-owners of radio stations WJLD (1400 AM) and WJLN-FM (104.7, now WZZK) – applied to launch a television station on UHF channel 48; after Southern Broadcasting's effort to acquire the channel 4 frequency failed, it sold the permit to Johnston in order for that group to operate its planned television station on the channel 42 frequency. As WBMG In 1956, Southern Broadcasting renewed its efforts to