WACH (channel 57) is a television station in Columbia, South Carolina, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios on Pickens Street in downtown Columbia, and its transmitter is located on Rush Road (southeast of I-20) in rural southwestern Kershaw County. History WCCT-TV After several false starts dating back to 1980, the station first signed on the air on September 1, 1981 as WCCT-TV (for Carolina Christian Television). It was founded by Carolina Christian Broadcasting, which also owned WGGS-TV (channel 16) in Greenville. It was the first independent station in Columbia, and the first completely new commercial station in the Midlands since WIS-TV signed on in 1953. ABC affiliate WOLO-TV operates under a license dating from earlier in 1953; it went off the air in 1956 and returned in 1961. The station's original studios were located on Sunset Boulevard (US 378) in West Columbia. Initially, it ran religious programming for most of the broadcast day, such as The 700 Club and The PTL Club, and televangelist programs from Richard Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart. It also carried WGGS' locally produced Christian program, Niteline. WCCT eventually began producing its own local version of the show. The rest of the day was taken up by secular syndicated programming, including cartoons, classic sitcoms, westerns, and hunting and sports programs. However, its programming policy was very conservative so as not to offend the sensibilities of its mostly fundamentalist and Pentecostal viewership. Notably, it refused to run any programming that contained profanity, violence or sexual content. As a Fox affiliate On June 11, 1988, the station was sold to FCVS Communications. On the day FCVS closed on its purchase of channel 57, it changed the call letters to WACH (the WCCT-TV calls are presently used by a CW-affiliated station in Waterbury, Connecticut, serving the Hartford–New Haven market) and relaunched it as the market's Fox affiliate, branding as "WACH-TV 57" (pronounced as "Watch TV 57"). For the first two years of Fox's existence, Columbia residents were only able to see the network's programming via its Washington, D.C. owned-and-operated station WTTG, which had been available on area cable systems for many years. That station continued to be available on Columbia's two major cable providers, Wometco and TCI, for several years afterward. FCVS significantly upgraded the station's programming, adding somewhat racier programming to the schedule. At first, WACH kept Christian-oriented religious