WLNE-TV (channel 6) is a television station licensed to New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States, serving as the ABC affiliate for the Providence, Rhode Island, area. It is owned by Standard Media, which maintains joint sales and shared services agreements with Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of NBC affiliate WJAR (channel 10), for the provision of certain services. The two stations share transmitter facilities in Rehoboth, Massachusetts; WLNE-TV's studios are located in the Orms Building in downtown Providence.

The station began broadcasting on January 1, 1963, as WTEV from studios on 430 County Street in New Bedford. The station's inaugural broadcast actually began at 11:58 p.m. on December 31, 1962, with the playing of "Auld Lang Syne" by Mitch Miller, followed by greetings from local political and religious leaders. WTEV's transmitter was located in Little Compton, Rhode Island, with the antenna mounted on a 500-foot (150 m) tower; a few years later, WTEV moved to a 950-foot (290 m) tower in Tiverton. The Tiverton transmitter was still 20 miles (32 km) away from the transmitter sites in Rehoboth used by the existing stations in the Providence market, WJAR-TV (channel 10) and WPRO-TV (channel 12, now WPRI-TV). However, WTEV could not build a tower in Rehoboth due to the risk of interference with WRGB in Schenectady, New York, WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine, and WFIL-TV in Philadelphia, which all broadcast on channel 6 in the analog era. Before cable arrived in Rhode Island in the early 1970s, this resulted in viewers experiencing reception problems with WTEV because of its signal being sent from a different direction than WJAR-TV and WPRO-TV/WPRI-TV. This forced viewers to mount their outdoor antennas on rotators to get a passable signal from the station. The ensuing signal problems would be the bane of channel 6's existence for 45 years.

ABC had a curious history in Rhode Island prior to WTEV's sign-on. In the earliest years of television in Providence, all four networks (including DuMont) were shoehorned on primary NBC affiliate WJAR-TV, at that time the market's only television station (WJAR carried about half of NBC's and CBS' programming, but very few ABC or DuMont shows). WNET launched on channel 16 in 1954 as an ABC affiliate. However, it was forced off the air in 1955 due to the difficulties faced by UHF startups at the time. Since television manufacturers were not required to include UHF tuning capability on television sets prior to 1964, viewers needed an expensive converter (or an all-channel set, the latter being very rare at the time) to watch WNET, and the picture was marginal at best even with one. For the seven years prior to channel 6's sign-on, WJAR and CBS affiliate WPRO-TV cherry-picked ABC programming, usually airing it in off-hours but occasionally preempting their primary network's schedule. Much of Rhode Island could access the full ABC schedule from Boston stations—WHDH-TV (channel 5, now occupied by WCVB-TV) prior to January 1, 1961, and WNAC-TV (channel 7, presently occupied by the present-day WHDH [not to be confused with the now-defunct WHDH on channel 5]) from 1961 to 1963.

Even though Providence was big enough to support three full network affiliates, it soon became apparent that channel 16 would not be resurrected in the near future. The owners of the future WTEV decided to seek a waiver of FCC technical regulations to allow VHF channel 6 to be added to the FCC's Table of Allocations. The channel 6 license had originally been allocated to the island of Nantucket off Cape Cod, in the Boston market. However, at the time, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules required that a station have its studios and offices located in its community of license, and numerous FCC filings argued that it was not practical to operate a full-service television station from Nantucket. Since a channel 6 allocation in the Providence area would have been short-spaced to WCSH-TV, WFIL-TV and WRGB, the FCC allocation was modified to New Bedford—the nearest city on the Massachusetts side of the market where a transmitter could be built that could decently cover Providence while protecting all three stations from interference.

New Bedford and Bristol County are part of the Rhode Island market due to Rhode Island's small geographic size, even though the rest of eastern Massachusetts is in the Boston market (counties were assigned by Arbitron and Nielsen to a particular television market based upon their viewing patterns). The advent of satellite television made this an irritation to some Massachusetts subscribers of services such as DirecTV and Dish Network who are unable to receive Massachusetts news and sports from Boston stations. The FCC allows network affiliates to prevent satellite subscribers from receiving network stations from outside the station's designated market. Bristol County is the only part of Massachusetts associated with Rhode Island for television purposes.

WTEV was founded by WTEV Television, Inc., a group that was 55-percent owned by E. Anthony and Sons, publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times and owner of WNBH radio (1340 AM and 98.1 FM, now WCTK); the remaining 45 percent was held by New England Television, the holder of the license for the old WNET. In 1966, shortly after E. Anthony and Sons sold the Standard-Times and WNBH, WTEV was purchased by Steinman Stations of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

On June 27, 1977, WTEV swapped affiliations with WPRI and became a CBS affiliate after Knight Ridder Television, which had just purchased WPRI, cut an affiliation deal that switched two of the three television stations it owned at the time to ABC. At the time, ABC was aggressively pursuing strong NBC and CBS affiliates to switch as their ratings rose during the late 1970s, and succeeded in persuading some longtime NBC and CBS stations to switch (as an example, KSTP-TV in Minneapolis–Saint Paul and WSB-TV in Atlanta, both longtime NBC affiliates, switched to ABC during that period).

In 1979, the Steinmans sold WTEV and their flagship station, WGAL-TV in Lancaster, to Pulitzer Publishing. This sale reunited them with KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which had been sold to Pulitzer in 1969. Pulitzer changed channel 6's call letters to the present-day WLNE-TV on September 8, 1980. The new call letters were used as a promotional acronym: "We Love New England". The WTEV call sign was later used on the CBS affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida, from March 1996 until September 2014, when that station changed its call sign to WJAX-TV. Under Pulitzer, the station acquired studio space in the Orms Building in downtown Providence. Within a few years, most of the station's main operations were moved to Providence. The original New Bedford facility was used as a news bureau, secondary studio, and sales office through the late 1980s.