A TV station with a "Full Service Television" license, so its eligible to declare must carry status. There's also a bunch of other regulatory requirements that come with it (E/I quota, community affairs, maintaining a public file, etc)What is a "full service station'?
LPTV and Class A stations are limited in maximum power (3 kW for VHF, 15 kW for UHF), and they can't declare must carry status to force cable and satellite carriage of their channels.
That's because DC's MeTV affiliate was originally WTTG 5.3 and in May 2022 it moved to the Weigel owned WDME-CD 48.1, but since that's a Class A license it's not eligible for must carry status, so DC area customers were still not blacked out of the national feed.It was never blacled out in the DC area.