Description
WRC-TV, virtual channel 4 (UHF digital channel 34), is an NBC owned-and-operated television station licensed to the American capital city of Washington, District of Columbia. Owned by the NBC Owned Television Stations subsidiary of NBCUniversal (itself a subsidiary of Comcast), it is sister to Class A Telemundo owned-and-operated station WZDC-CD (channel 44) and regional sports network NBC Sports Washington. WRC-TV and WZDC-CD share studios and transmitter facilities on Nebraska Avenue in the Tenleytown neighborhood of northwest Washington.
WRC-TV houses and originates NBC News' Washington bureau, out of which the network's (and television's) long-running political events program, Meet the Press, is based.
On cable, the station is available on Comcast Xfinity channel 24 in Washington, D.C. (C-SPAN is carried on cable channel 4) and channel 4 in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and on Cox Communications, RCN and Verizon FiOS channel 4.
Programming:
As of September 2019, syndicated programs broadcast by WRC-TV include Access Hollywood, The Kelly Clarkson Show (both are produced by sister station KNBC), and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, among others.
Because of its ownership by the network, WRC-TV generally carries the entire NBC network schedule, though the station airs an alternate live feed of NBC Nightly News at 7 p.m. (rather than 6:30 p.m. as with most NBC stations in the Eastern Time Zone), due to a longtime hour-long 6 p.m. newscast. The weekend edition of the network's newscast airs at its usual 6:30 p.m. time slot. Like network flagship WNBC, it airs Meet the Press an hour-and-a-half later than most NBC affiliates in the Eastern Time Zone due to a two-hour Sunday morning newscast.
WRC-TV's building is home to Meet the Press, the longest-running program in U.S. broadcast television history, which debuted on November 6, 1947 and It's Academic, which premiered in 1961 and is the longest-running game show in television history according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Sam and Friends, Jim Henson's late-night precursor to Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, got its start on WRC-TV on May 9, 1955. WRC-TV was served as the production facilities for the original run of The McLaughlin Group from its premiere in 1982 until May 2008, when the production facilities moved to Tegna Inc.-owned CBS affiliate and WRC-TV's rival WUSA and it remained until the original show's ending in 2016.
