WTWO

WTWO (channel 2) is a television station in Terre Haute, Indiana, United States, affiliated with NBC. Its second digital subchannel serves as an owned-and-operated station of The CW (via The CW Plus). WTWO is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which provides certain services to ABC affiliate WAWV-TV (channel 38) under joint sales and shared services agreements with Mission Broadcasting. The two stations share studios on US 41/150 in unincorporated Sullivan County (south of Farmersburg), where WTWO's transmitter is also located.

The station first signed on the air on September 1, 1965. Founded by Illiana Telecasting, the first program ever broadcast on WTWO was NBC's morning news program Today, which aired at 7 that morning. WTWO, whose call letters were originally assigned to what is now fellow NBC affiliate WLBZ in Bangor, Maine, from 1954 to 1958, originally operated as a primary NBC affiliate with a secondary affiliation with ABC; it carried ABC network programs either on tape delay or by airing them live from the network feed through occasional preemptions of NBC programs (the most notable preemption being the 1967–1969 science fiction series Star Trek).

Eleven days after its sign-on, on September 12, 1965, WTWO began broadcasting network programming in color. Illiana Telecasting sold the station to Booth Newspapers in 1968. ABC programming was split between channel 2 and primary CBS affiliate WTHI-TV (channel 10) until April 1973, when the network moved to upstart WIIL-TV (channel 38, now WAWV-TV, which would eventually drop ABC to join Fox in September 1995 and rejoin ABC in September 2011). In July 1975, Booth Newspapers sold the station to Malcolm Glazer's Fabri Development Corporation. Malcolm Glazer sold WTWO and two of its sister stations, WRBL in Columbus, Georgia, and KQTV in St. Joseph, Missouri, to TCS Television Partners in 1990. TCS Television Partners sold both WTWO and KQTV to Irving, Texas–based Nexstar Broadcasting Group in 1997.

In the spring of 2006, the station dropped on-air references to its channel 2 allocation in its branding, opting to brand simply by the WTWO call letters; the channel 2 branding was restored on October 18, 2010, when it changed its on-air brand to "NBC 2".

On July 9, 2012, Time Warner Cable replaced Cincinnati NBC affiliate WLWT with WTWO on its systems in southwestern Ohio and northeastern Kentucky, due to a carriage dispute with WLWT owner Hearst Television, that resulted in its stations being pulled from TWC's systems in several markets. Nexstar complained that Time Warner Cable substituted the Hearst stations with its own outside of their market areas without permission, while the provider alleged it was within its rights to carry select Nexstar-owned stations as replacements until it reached a new agreement with Hearst, which Hearst and Time Warner Cable reached on July 19, restoring WLWT on its Cincinnati area systems.

Nexstar announced that it would acquire Media General, owners of rival WTHI-TV on January 27, 2016. Despite WTHI's higher ratings, on March 4, 2016, Nexstar and Mission declared their intentions to keep WTWO/WAWV and sell WTHI to another company; four months later; on June 13, 2016, it announced that WTHI and four other stations would be acquired by Heartland Media, through its USA Television MidAmerica Holdings joint venture with MSouth Equity Partners, for $115 million, to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership caps.

On September 1, 2024, WTWO-DT2 assumed The CW affiliation in Terre Haute from WTHI-TV. Nexstar owns a majority stake in the network.

WTWO made national news in January 2006 when it declined to air the controversial NBC dramedy series The Book of Daniel, citing calls and emails from viewers objecting to the show's plotline involving Jesus Christ as the rationale for its decision. In a statement on the station's website, then-general manager Duane Lammers stated "our relationship with NBC always provided for the right to reject programming. I am reaffirming that right to let them know I will not allow them to make unilateral decisions affecting our viewers". Due to poor ratings and affiliates in other markets (including Little Rock sister station KARK-TV) also choosing to preempt the program, NBC canceled the show after only three episodes (this incident may have served as the basis for a plotline in a 2006 episode of the short-lived NBC drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which an NBC affiliate in Terre Haute refused to air the titular comedy series in the show because of a sketch called "Crazy Christians").^{[citation needed]}