WEIU-TV

WEIU-TV (channel 51) is an educational independent television station licensed to Charleston, Illinois, United States. It is owned by Eastern Illinois University (EIU) alongside campus radio station WEIU (88.9 FM). The two stations share studios at Buzzard Hall on the EIU campus on 9th Street in Charleston; WEIU-TV's transmitter is located near Humboldt, Illinois.

From 1986 to 2025, WEIU-TV served as a secondary PBS member station for the Champaign–Springfield–Decatur market. As a member of PBS' Program Differentiation Plan (PDP), it aired 25% of the PBS network schedule.

WEIU-TV's broadcast radius extends south to Effingham, north to Champaign, west to Decatur, and east to Terre Haute, Indiana.

The station serves Champaign, Christian, Clark, Coles, Crawford, Cumberland, Douglas, Edgar, Effingham, Jasper, Macon, Moultrie, Piatt, Sangamon, Shelby, and Vermilion counties in Illinois and Vigo County in Indiana.

WEIU-TV began operations on July 1, 1986, as an independent non-commercial station offering public affairs and instructional programming, as well as the student-run news program News Scan. On January 30, 1992, WEIU-TV officially joined PBS. In January 2002, the newscast was renamed News Watch; it currently airs from 5:30 to 6 p.m. News Watch won its first Emmy Award in 2009 and its second Emmy in 2010.

WEIU-TV launched its first digital broadcast in 2006, on UHF channel 50 (tuned as virtual channel 51). The station began broadcasting in high definition (HD) on March 22, 2010. It offered the first local HD newscast for viewers in central Illinois. Before June 2010, no commercial television stations in the market were producing news in HD, which changed when NBC affiliate WAND became the first to make the switch.

In August 2025, WEIU-TV announced it was ending its affiliation with PBS as of September 30, amid cuts to the station's primary funder, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

WEIU-TV's transmitter is located near Humboldt, Illinois. The station's signal is multiplexed: