21 Facts About WNET

WNET, branded on-air as "Thirteen", is a television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey, United States, serving the New York City area as a member of PBS.

WNET commenced broadcasting on May 15,1948, from a transmitter located atop First Mountain in West Orange, New Jersey, as WATV, a commercial television station owned by Atlantic Television, a subsidiary of Bremer Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1982, more than 20 years after becoming the New York area's flagship public television station, WNET moved its operations to the Hudson Hotel at 237 West 58th Street in Manhattan, while retaining the Gateway Center studios for a few more years.

In 1998, WNET moved to 450 West 33rd Street, straddling the railroad tracks going into Pennsylvania Station.

Some time later, in February 2003, WNET completed its merger with Long Island PBS broadcaster WLIW, combining the two stations into one operation.

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On July 1,2011, WNET took over the programming of New Jersey Network's television stations, which were relaunched as NJTV.

The transfer of programming to WNET was part of Governor Chris Christie's plan for the New Jersey government's exit from public broadcasting.

On May 9,2017, it was announced that WNET would resume broadcasting from Lower Manhattan at One World Trade Center by the end of the year.

WNET has produced programming for public television stations distributed outside of the PBS system, including:.

WNET was one of the original co-producing entities of the PBS NewsHour, along with Washington, DC PBS member station WETA-TV and MacNeil-Lehrer Productions.

WNET produced weekend editions of PBS NewsHour alongside WETA-TV for the weekday editions until 2022 when WETA assumed production for the weekend edition in addition to the weekday editions.

The suit asserted that WNET had used grant money that was given for the production of programs including American Masters, Great Performances and Cyberchase for other purposes.

WNET settled the lawsuit in June 2010 by paying back the United States government $950,000, pledging to instate a program to ensure they honored all future federal grant requirements and agreeing to not receive $1,015,046 in federal grant money that was about to be awarded, WNET Vice President and General Counsel, Robert Feinberg, said to The New York Times: "This is not a scenario we want to repeat and we have no intention of repeating it".

In November 2012, WNET was scheduled to air Alex Gibney's film Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream produced by Independent Lens.

WNET replaced the film's introduction by Stanley Tucci with a new introduction calling the film "controversial" and "provocative".

WNET followed the statement with an on-air round-table discussion where the moderator repeatedly mentioned that Koch's philanthropic contributions totaled a billion dollars.

In September 2013, WNET launched a series called The Pension Peril, examining the economic sustainability of public pensions and promoting cuts to their funding.

Stephen Segaller, WNET's vice president for programming told The New York Times on February 13,2014, that he had "absolute conviction" that the Laura and John Arnold Foundation was an admissible funder and the funding did not violate PBS' "perception" rule.

Segaller said it was "preposterous" to suggest that WNET had a censorship agenda when both programs had run for more than a decade.

In June 2015, a media furor forced WNET to postpone the third season of Finding Your Roots when the Sony Pictures hack revealed via hacked emails that a subject of the series, Ben Affleck, had lobbied for material relating to a relative owning slaves be removed from the show.

WNET is carried in all of Mercer County, New Jersey on Comcast, Optimum TV and Verizon Fios.