WDSU: The Times-Picayune covers 175 years of New Orleans history

New Orleans officially entered the television era at 6 p.m. on Dec. 18, 1948, when WDSU’s state-of-the-art, 30,800-watt, 424-foot-high, bat-winged antenna filled the airwaves with an invocation by Monsignor Charles J. Plauche. “I feel that television will do the same thing for the city that the automobile did in 1910,” proclaimed Mayor deLesseps S. Morrison during the inaugural telecast live from the Municipal Auditorium, which featured a stand-up comic, two opera singers, a concert pianist, an 11-year-old accordion player and a vaudeville magic act.

Attendees at that first live broadcast event numbered about 5,000, or about 4,900 more than the number of TV sets in New Orleans at the time. “And most of those were in stores,” station founder Edgar Stern later recalled.

WDSU’s entry into the TV era wasn’t quite historic — 47 other stations around the country were already on the air by then — and the early programming was less than groundbreaking, as evidenced by The Times-Picayune TV log for Dec. 22, 1948. Featured program at 8:15 p.m.: “Woman Speaks.”

What did prove significant for New Orleanians is that WDSU came first. Powered by Stern’s deep pockets and passion for community service, Channel 6 quickly developed into a nationally respected TV news and entertainment powerhouse.

The 1950s lineup was remarkably ambitious: children’s shows such as “Mrs. Muffin” and “Let’s Tell a Story”; talk shows such as “Second Cup” and “Midday”; the daily comedy stylings of a young Dick Van Dyke in studio (“I think I was knocking off Arthur Godfrey,” he later said); and enterprising news initiatives, such as the first live broadcast of a congressional hearing, the introduction of TV cameras on the floor of the state Legislature, and the opening of a full-time Washington bureau to cover the Louisiana delegation in Congress.

During the 1960s, WDSU won a Peabody Award, the TV equivalent of a Pulitzer, for its editorials; and a pair of Emmys, for documentaries on Huey Long and the Ku Klux Klan.

“No station has done more journalistic pioneering than New Orleans’ WDSU-TV,” Time magazine wrote in 1966, and that tradition of broadcasting excellence raised the bar for every local TV station that followed: WJMR (now WVUE, in 1953); WWL and WYES (1957); WGNO (1967); WNOL and WLAE (1984); WCCL (now WPXL, 1989); WHNO (1994); WUPL (1995); and KGLA (2007).