East Tennessee's Own

Medium Rare Inc., a company headed by Greeneville^[2] men Jay Austin and Robert Lochte, filed on October 20, 1982, for a construction permit to build a station on channel 39 in Greeneville.^[3] The Federal Communications Commission granted the permit on May 25, 1983;^[4] Medium Rare then sold WMGL, an FM radio station it owned in Pulaski, Tennessee.^[5]

WETO ("East Tennessee's Own") announced its forthcoming existence in March 1985; the station would have a general-entertainment independent format and studios in a Greeneville industrial park.^[6] The antenna, on a tower on Camp Creek Bald^[2] of Viking Mountain near Greeneville, was installed in September,^[7] The station, which began broadcasting on November 4, 1985,^[8] represented a $1.6 million investment for the owners.^[9]

WETO affiliated with Fox when the network launched in 1986.^[10] This made it the closest Fox affiliate to Knoxville, where it took a year for WKCH-TV to link up with the fourth network.^[11]

As a business, WETO-TV suffered after several years. Undercapitalized from the start, Austin and Lochte failed to anticipate a surge in programming costs or difficulties achieving cable carriage from the repeal of must-carry rules requiring systems to offer local stations.^[12] At first, East Tennessee's Own Inc. (the former Medium Rare) reached a deal in October 1988 to sell the station to MT Communications of Los Angeles, with most of the purchase price in assumption of debt.^[13] The original MT deal never took place,^[14] and in the meantime, the station was sued for failing to pay ASCAP dues and thereby broadcasting copyrighted music, including the theme to the Fox series Duet, without permission.^[15]

MT Communications ownership

On July 7, 1989, a public auction was held at the WETO studios in Greeneville.^[14] The original winning bid of $1.9 million came from Elvin Feltner and his company, Krypton Broadcasting.^{[16][lower-alpha 1]} When Krypton failed to put together financing for the deal, MT Communications won the auction with its bid of $1.85 million.^[17]

MT Communications took over on November 15, 1989, and changed the call sign to WEMT on December 1.^[18] This call sign change coincided with similar moves at its Fox affiliates in Memphis (WMKW-TV to WLMT) and Nashville (WCAY-TV to WXMT).^[19] MT Communications also acquired WJWT, a struggling Fox affiliate in Jackson, and converted it to a semi-satellite of WLMT with local advertising that December;^[20] it became WMTU in January 1990.^[21]

MT Communications had its own struggles, though the Tri-Cities were not as affected; revenues at WEMT increased 130 percent in 1990 and another 35 percent in 1991.^[22] In 1990, its stations in Memphis and Nashville lost their Fox affiliations to higher-rated independents in their markets, the latter in a deal in which the Nashville station sold much of its programming inventory.^[23][24] WMTU continued to air Fox programming until 1992, when it resumed broadcasting WLMT on a full-time basis.^[25][26]

Max Media and Sinclair ownership

In December 1991, MT Communications moved to sell three of its four stations—WMTU, WLMT, and WEMT—to former Virginia lieutenant governor Dick Davis. Max Media—a Virginia company founded by three former officers of TVX Broadcast Group—then would manage the stations for Davis.^[27] Max Media began the process of moving WEMT out of Greeneville and to a more centrally located site in the Tri-Cities. The station already had a sales office in Johnson City, Tennessee, but it was insufficient to house the whole station.^[28] The entire operation moved to a new building on Hanover Road in Johnson City in February 1993. The station also analyzed the eventual possibility of starting a local newscast at this time.^[29] Max Media, which had only been serving as manager, acquired WEMT outright in 1994.^[30]

The company's stations were acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1998.^[31] Even though the larger deal closed in July 1998, Sinclair had to wait to acquire WEMT because it owned a station with an overlapping coverage area; it instead took over operations under a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Max Media.^[32]

Operation with WCYB

In 2005, Sinclair sold WEMT's license for $1.4 million to Aurora Broadcasting Inc. and the non-license assets for $5.6 million to BlueStone Television, which owned NBC affiliate WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia. As part of the deal, WCYB-TV assumed most of the station's operations and began producing a local 10 p.m. newscast for WEMT.^[33] The Aurora purchase closed in February 2006;^[34] that May, BlueStone put all of its television properties on the market,^[35] and parallel with Bonten Media Group acquiring BlueStone, Esteem Broadcasting purchased WEMT from Aurora.^[36]

WEMT shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 39, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 38, using virtual channel 39.^[37] However, the station continued to broadcast from Viking Mountain until November 2011, when its transmitter was moved to Holston Mountain, a shift northeast that improved the signal strength and coverage in the Tri-Cities and southwest Virginia while removing areas around Knoxville from the service area.^[38]

On April 21, 2017, Sinclair announced its intent to purchase the Bonten stations for $240 million. As an aspect of the deal, the Esteem stations were sold to Sinclair affiliate Cunningham Broadcasting, maintaining the current operational arrangement.^[39] The sale was completed on September 1.^[40]

WEMT relocated its signal from channel 38 to channel 28 on April 12, 2019, as a result of the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction.^[41]