WALE - As WALE

As WALE

The station acquired the current WALE call sign from the Federal Communications Commission on July 24, 1989. The original WALE callsign was held for some 25 or so years by a different company operating out of the basement of an abandoned theater in Fall River, Massachusetts. Colonel Milton Mittler (formerly of WADK) was the owner.

When Francis Battaglia's North American Broadcasting Company bought WEAN, they attempted to program a talk format. The top rated show at this time was hosted by Rhode Island talk show legend Steve White. In the summer of 1991, WALE host Bob Giammarco was recognized by Arbitron as having the top rated evening program (After Hours with Bob Giammarco) in the market. This was no small feat considering the evening signal was quite low and the listening area was limited.

As the 1990s wore on, the station added more & more brokered programming until the station aired nothing but brokered programming. WALE earned a reputation in the Providence area as having fringe programming, such as American Dissident Voices program of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, which aired from 16:00-16:30 on Saturdays to nearly no listeners. WALE was also the home of Rick Adams, a follower of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, who aired discussions promoting Holocaust denial. The station attracted further notoriety when it was discovered that many of their brokered hosts (often recruited by station personnel) were never compensated for their financial investments (some of which invested as much as $5,000 per three-month contracts), as WALE has no sales staff whatsoever.

WALE was first sold in 2002 to Jerry Evans' Moon Song Communications, and then was sold again at a bankruptcy auction in 2003 to Cumbre Communications, where it reemerged as "Supermax 990", a Spanish-language format. Cumbre also attempted to change WALE's call letters to WMAX, which was impossible due to an existing AM station in Ypsilanti, Michigan already holding the callsign. Cumbre Communications declared bankruptcy themselves in 2004 to try to avoid completing their purchase of the station after they learned the transmitter site had serious environmental issues.

WALE went silent on December 29, 2006 & returned to the airwaves in late 2007 at half power. In January 2008, the station requested permission to go silent again based on a technical problem causing the transmitter to consume too much power that made the station "economically unfeasible" to operate. The FCC rejected that request. According to the filing, Cumbre Communications is still in bankruptcy, as a "debtor in possession".

The station was most recently airing a Spanish-language adult contemporary format as "Amor 990" (Love 990).

The station was an affiliate of the Red Sox Beisbol Network in 2005 & 2008.

In 2009, it went back on the air as "WALE ABC Radio News Now 990" and became an affiliate of ABC News Radio. For a brief period, they broadcast an audio feed of WLNE-TV's former 24-hour cable news television channel, NewsChannel 5 (formerly the Rhode Island News Channel), in various timeslots. On Labor Day 2009, WALE carried WLNE's entire broadcast of the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, which was being simulcast on NewsChannel 5 (now operated by WJAR as Ocean State Networks (OSN)). An assortment of odd brokered fare also emerged once again on the station.

As of August 18, 2010, WALE is once again silent.