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WGN Radio (720 kHz) is co-owned with WGN-TV (Channel 9) and both are owned by the Tribune Company which owns the Chicago Tribune newspaper. WGN-AM's transmitter is located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
WGN-TV Television began test broadcasts in February of 1948 and began regular programing the following month.
Early on, WGN-TV was affiliated with the DuMont Network and the CBS network.
WGN-TV is now the Chicago affiliate of the Warner Brothers television network. WGN-TV also broadcasts its programming (sans the WB shows) via satellite to DirectTV, DishNetwork and cable television subscribers around the United States, thus elevating it to Superstation status.
On November 22, 1987, during the 9 O'Clock News sportscast, WGN's broadcast signal was hijacked by an unknown person wearing a Max Headroom mask for approximately 25 seconds. This was the only the first incident of that night involving the interruption of a television station's broadcast signal; approximately two hours later, Chicago PBS station WTTW-TV Channel 11 had its broadcast interrupted by the same person. WGN's transmitter is atop the John Hancock building and engineers were almost immediately able to thwart the video hacker by changing the Studio To Transmitter frequency, thus cutting the hacker off. Unfortunately for WTTW, its transmitter is atop the Sears Tower311 South Wacker Drive from the street The Sears Tower is a skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois. Commissioned by Sears, it was designed by chief architect Bruce Graham and structural Engineer Fazlur Kahn of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. Construction commenced and it was unable to stop the hacker before enduring almost two minutes of the hacker's interruption.