By September 1994, with only a little more than two months left before WAGA-TV was slated to join Fox, CBS faced the prospect of having to pipe in WRBL in Columbus, WMAZ-TV in Macon, WSPA-TV in Spartanburg, South Carolina and WDEF-TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee for Atlanta-area cable customers until it found a new affiliate in the market. Almost out of desperation, on September 26, CBS made a deal to buy WVEU for $46 million. However, this was only a contingency, since CBS preferred to move its programming to a higher-profile station. It continued to negotiate with Tribune Broadcasting to reach a deal to affiliate with WGNX, which was especially attractive for the network since channel 46 was the only non-Big Three station in the Atlanta market that had a functioning news department. That November, Tribune relented and signed a deal with CBS to convert WGNX into the network's new Atlanta affiliate. As a consequence of the WGNX deal, CBS reached an agreement to sell WVEU to Viacom from Broadcasting Corp. of Georgia for $27 million, in a deal that saw it sell CBS affiliate KSLA in Shreveport, Louisiana to Ellis Communications (owned by Atlanta-based businessman Bert Ellis) to comply with FCC ownership rules in coincidence with Viacom's divestitures of its major network-affiliated television stations to focus on its UPN charter outlets.