12 in any capacity he physically could, and spoke well of his time at WVTV until he died on April 26, 2005. Newscasts returned to the station in August 2003 with the launch of WB18 News at 9, an hour-long program which featured a mix of local news stories from staff at WVTV's facility (anchored by Lisa Fielding on weeknights, and Tami Hughes on weekends), and national and international reports, weather forecasts and sports segments from Sinclair's News Central local/national hybrid operation based at the company's headquarters on Beaver Dam Road in Hunt Valley, Maryland. It also aired The Point, a controversial one-minute conservative political commentary feature, that was a requirement of all Sinclair-owned stations that aired newscasts (regardless of whether it carried the News Central format or not). The program was reduced to a half-hour in September 2005 due to ratings issues, and was eventually discontinued on March 31, 2006, due to cutbacks in Sinclair's news operations companywide, which included the disbandment of its News Central division. As of 2013, Terry Gaughan, general manager of WVTV and WCGV, has said there are no plans to relaunch a news operation; although the station has inquired the market's existing news-producing stations about entering into a news share agreement. WVTV began to carry Sinclair's national morning newscast The National Desk in January 2021, then the late primetime edition in September 2021. Currently the station's local programming output is limited to the public affairs program Connect MKE which airs several times a week on both WVTV subchannels. The program was previously known as Our Issues Milwaukee from 2013 until the end of 2021. Technical information Subchannels The station's digital signal is multiplexed, with the former WCGV channels numbered with virtual channel 24: On June 23, 2014, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Sony Pictures Entertainment announced an affiliation agreement for Sony's digital subchannel movie network, getTV, which included WVTV for the Milwaukee market and came online the afternoon of July 3. Sony leased the channel space on 18.2 for their network. Charter added WVTV-DT2 to their systems on December 2, 2014, which is carried on channel 179. The network was dropped on January 2, 2018, one week ahead of WCGV merging their channels onto WVTV's spectrum as part of Sinclair's sale of WCGV's spectrum back to the FCC in the 2016 auction. WCGV's existing channel numbers were retained. WIWN (channel 68) eventually picked up getTV