WMAL

WMAL is one of the oldest radio stations in Washington, D.C.. It is a news-talk formatted station, broadcasting at AM 630.

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WMAL first went on the air on October 12, 1925, using call letters incorporating the initials of M.A. Leese, a local optician. The station shifted through various frequencies in its first three years, until the Federal Radio Commission's national frequency allocation plan assigned WMAL the AM 630 frequency in 1928; WMAL still broadcasts on that frequency today. WMAL was a CBS affiliate from 1928 until October 19, 1932, and then was briefly unaffiliated until joining the NBC Blue network in January 1933; this network later became ABC, which WMAL is still affiliated with today. WMAL broadcast from various facilities in Washington, D.C., and suburban Maryland until July 25, 1973, when it settled in at its current studio facility at 4400 Jenifer Street NW in Washington, two blocks from the city's border with Maryland. WMAL's transmitting facility, located in the Bradley Hills section of suburban Bethesda, Maryland, also housed studios for WMAL's AM, FM, and TV stations at one time.

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Among the WMAL broadcasters over the years have been Frank Harden and Jackson Weaver, who co-hosted WMAL's morning show for more than four decades until Weaver's death in the early 1990s; Tom Gauger, who also spent several decades at WMAL; Arthur Godfrey, a national radio and early-TV personality who briefly broadcast on WMAL in 1933 as "Red" Godfrey; Bill Mayhugh, a mellow-voiced overnight broadcaster; and Chris Core, a former Voice of America announcer who has been an on-air host at WMAL since the 1970s. The station also kept a local following by broadcasting sports games featuring the Washington Redskins and University of Maryland, College Park Terrapins; Terrapins football and basketball broadcasts remain an important feature on WMAL.

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WMAL was originally owned by a company run by Leese. It was acquired by the publishers of the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper in 1938. In October 1947, WMAL-TV signed on as the first high-band VHF television station in the United States. It became an ABC affiliate a year later. The family-owned company that published the Star was purchased by Joseph L. Albritton in 1976, and the radio stations were spun off to ABC the following year. ABC continues to own both stations today, though the FM station has since become WRQX (Mix 107.3). The former WMAL-TV is now WJLA-TV (after Albritton's initials), but there are rumors that Albritton is looking to sell to ABC. This would reunite WJLA with its former radio sisters, and it is possible that it would become WMAL-TV once again.

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WMAL on-air hosts today, in addition to Chris Core, include morning-show co-hosts Fred Grandy and Andy Parks, gardening host Jos Roozen , investing adviser Ric Edelman, and lawyer Mike Collins. The station also carries national hosts Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Paul Harvey, John Batchelor,and the Coast to Coast AM show hosted by George Noory and Art Bell. In August 2005 conservative host Michael Graham was fired due to remarks on Islam being a terrorist organization.

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Washington, D.C.: Washington, D.C....

News-talk: REDIRECT Talk radio...

AM: Am is the present-tense, first-person singular form of the verb "", the copula of the English language....