KCAL-TV
KCAL-TV is an independent television station in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is owned by the CBS News and Stations group alongside CBS West Coast flagship KCBS-TV. The two stations share studios at the Radford Studio Center on Radford Avenue in the Studio City section of Los Angeles; KCAL-TV's transmitter is located atop Mount Wilson.
History
KFI-TV (1948–1951)
Channel 9 signed on the air as commercial station KFI-TV on August 25, 1948, owned by Earle C. Anthony alongside KFI radio. However, the station was originally licensed as experimental W6XEA about 1940, and in 1944 applied for the call letters KSEE. It is unknown whether any transmissions occurred under either call sign.The station initially broadcast a limited schedule with six hours weekly, and formally began operations on October 6, 1948, with hours that day. Though KFI had long been affiliated with NBC Radio, KFI-TV did not affiliate with the then-upstart NBC Television Network as NBC was building its own station, KNBH, which went on the air in January 1949. KFI general manager William B. Ryan indicated a willingness to affiliate with a network other than NBC or start a mutual regional network. Channel 9 has been an independent station for virtually its entire history, though it carried DuMont programming from 1954 up until that network's 1956 demise.
At the 3rd Emmy Awards in January 1951, the station won in the best educational show category for KFI-TV University.
KHJ-TV (1951–1989)
Channel 9's engineers threatened to go on strike in 1951 over financial reasons the station had to go through, leading Anthony to sell the station to the General Tire and Rubber Company in August of that year. A few months earlier, General Tire had purchased the Don Lee Broadcasting System, a regional West Coast radio network. Don Lee's flagship station was KHJ radio, and General Tire changed its new television station's call letters to KHJ-TV in September 1951. One former employee referred to the call letters as standing for "kindness, happiness and joy", although the call sign was likely randomly assigned. The Don Lee name was so well respected in California broadcasting that KHJ-TV called itself "Don Lee Television" for a few years in the early 1950s, even though it had never been affiliated with KHJ radio until the 1951 deal.In 1955, General Tire purchased RKO Radio Pictures to give the company's television station group access to RKO's film library. In 1959, General Tire's broadcasting and film divisions were merged as RKO General.
By the mid-1960s, channel 9 offered a standard independent schedule of movies, off-network reruns, children's shows like The Pancake Man hosted by Hal Smith, first-run syndicated programs, and locally produced programs including local newscasts, sports events and public affairs programs. In the late 1960s, KHJ embarked on a novel, groundbreaking experiment, called Tempo, which heavily borrowed from the talk radio craze on local radio stations. Daytime programming was divided into three blocks running three hours in length, called Tempo I, Tempo II and Tempo III. The second of the three programs, Tempo II was perhaps the most active, controversial and innovative. For the first couple of years the hosts were Stan Bohrman and Maria Cole. Guests ranged from William F. Buckley to Sammy Davis Jr. and the political movers and shakers in Southern California. At one point, Stan even quit the program after what he called censorship on the topic of Eldridge Cleaver. Bohrman came back to the program and was joined by a new co-host, Regis Philbin. They became a very popular fixture in Los Angeles television. In fact, in his book about those days, Philbin credits the chemistry with Bohrman and the format of the program as forerunners of much of what would become the cable news format 20 years later.
In the early 1970s, KHJ-TV sought a similar programming strategy to that of crosstown competitor KTLA, which focused more on talk shows, game shows, sports, feature films and off-network drama series. The cartoons were phased out, and the station ran fewer off-network sitcoms. It did continue to have a weekday children's show called Froozles, which ran until the late 1980s. It also produced many half-hour public affairs programs, as well as a local talk show called Mid-Morning L.A. The first hosts were Kathy McKee and Sandy Baron on the Mid Day and Good Morning L.A. talk shows. Both were hired by KHJ's then-station manager Lional Schaen. Bob Hilton, Meredith MacRae, Geoff Edwards and Regis Philbin also hosted programs on the station well into the 1980s. Edwards and MacRae won Emmy Awards for their hosting duties during the early 1980s. Some other locally produced public affairs programs included the investigative show Camera 9 and The Changing Family, a program about family and social issues during the 1980s. Despite this, KHJ-TV was perceived as an also ran while KTLA was the leading independent station, even though it had a similar format.
Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes battle was underway with serious implications for the station's future—and that of its owner. In 1965, RKO General faced a threat to its license for KHJ-TV from a group called Fidelity Television. At first, Fidelity's claim focused on channel 9's programming quality. Later, Fidelity levied a more serious claim that KHJ-TV was involved in reciprocal trade practices. Fidelity alleged that RKO's parent company, General Tire, forced its retailers to purchase advertising on KHJ-TV and other RKO-owned stations as a condition of their contracts with General Tire. An administrative law judge found in favor of Fidelity, but RKO appealed. In 1972, the FCC allowed RKO to keep the license for KHJ-TV, but two years later conditioned future renewals on the renewal of sister station WNAC-TV in Boston.
Six years later, the FCC stripped WNAC-TV of its license for numerous reasons, but largely because RKO had misled the commission about corporate misconduct at General Tire. The decision was affirmed after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in April 1982. The FCC awarded a replacement license for channel 7 in Boston to New England Television, a merger of two competing groups for a new channel 7. RKO General sold off WNAC-TV's non-license assets to New England Television, who used them to launch WNEV-TV in place of WNAC-TV that May 21. The WNAC-TV decision also meant KHJ-TV and sister station WOR-TV in New York City had lost their licenses, but an appeals court ruled that the FCC erred when it tied channel 9's renewal to that of WNAC-TV and ordered new hearings for KHJ-TV and WOR-TV.
The hearings dragged on for five years; as a result of this, the station was forced to air an unusually large amount of public-affairs programming; a combination of this and the station's cash reserves being drained by RKO's legal battles led to decreased ratings. For a time, KHJ-TV's large slate of sports programming was virtually the only thing keeping the station afloat.
On August 11, 1987, FCC administrative law judge Edward Kuhlmann found RKO General unfit to be a broadcast licensee due to numerous cases of dishonesty on both its part and that of parent company GenCorp, including fraudulent billing and lying about its ratings. Kuhlman ordered that all of RKO General's broadcast licenses be revoked. This ruling notably excluded WOR-TV, which had already been divested to MCA Inc. nine months prior, and was renamed WWOR-TV. GenCorp initially filed an appeal, only to withdraw it after the FCC warned that any appeal would almost certainly be denied outright. The FCC strongly advised GenCorp to divest its remaining properties to avoid the indignity of additional license stripping without any compensation.
KCAL-TV (1989–present)
Disney ownership (1988–1996)
In the midst of RKO's corporate issues, the company reached terms to sell KHJ-TV to Westinghouse Broadcasting in November 1985. However, the protracted legal issues delayed FCC action on the transfer and Westinghouse ultimately withdrew its offer. A short time later, RKO General agreed to sell the station to The Walt Disney Company; however, this transfer was also held up for over a year for the same reasons. Fidelity Television, the group that originally challenged the license in 1965, also argued against the sale. In July 1988, the FCC allowed Disney to acquire channel 9 for $324 million in a complicated settlement. RKO dropped its bid to renew the station's license, handing it to Fidelity Television. Disney then bought the channel 9 license from Fidelity for $105.4 million and KHJ-TV's non-license assets from RKO for $218.6 million. According to FCC general counsel Diane Killory, the settlement had the same effect as finding RKO unfit to be a broadcast licensee, and RKO thus had no choice but to "get out of the business of broadcasting".Disney began operating KHJ-TV on December 2, 1988. Over the next few months Disney fired channel 9's entire management team it inherited from RKO, including general manager Charles Velona and news director Stephanie Rank Brady. Several of the station's newscasters were pushed out as well. During the RKO/Fidelity/Disney transition, KHJ-TV's city of license was changed to the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk, also as part of the FCC settlement. For all intents and purposes, though, it remained a Los Angeles station; the license was moved back to Los Angeles proper on October 28, 1991.
On December 2, 1989—the first anniversary of its ownership, Disney changed channel 9's callsign to the present KCAL-TV, and relaunched the station as "California 9", selected from a shortlist of three possible monikers. Channel 9's longtime radio sisters had changed their calls to KRTH some years before, so Disney was theoretically free to continue trading on the KHJ call letters' 66-year legacy in Southern California. However, newly hired station manager Blake Byrne said that market research revealed the station was seen as a "non-entity" in the market, leading Disney to conclude that it needed a fresh start. Disney did, however, keep a fresco mural of RKO stars in the station lobby. The station also continued to overhaul its format in the wake of its ownership change, adding a three-hour prime time newscast on March 5, 1990, featuring veteran newscasters Jerry Dunphy, Pat Harvey, Larry Carroll and Jane Velez-Mitchell. KCAL also added many more children's programs, including cartoons from the Walt Disney animation library. The station also added a few more family-oriented off-network sitcoms and syndicated programs and then broadcast the popular anime series Dragon Ball Z, that lasted well into 1997. In the early 1990s, family sitcoms were gradually phased out and KCAL added more first-run syndicated talk, reality and court shows, as well as newsmagazine series.
On March 30, 1992, Disney agreed to sell KCAL-TV's license to Pinelands, Inc., then the parent company of channel 9's former New York City sister station, now called WWOR-TV. Disney would have received a 45% ownership stake in Pinelands, allowing for increased original programming to be shared between the two reunited stations. The planned merger never materialized; Pineland would agree to sell WWOR-TV to Chris-Craft Industries, then-parent of KCOP. In 1995, the station adopted the "K-CAL 9" branding.