KOVR
KOVR is a television station licensed to Stockton, California, United States, serving as the CBS outlet for the Sacramento area. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside KMAX-TV, an independent station. The two stations share studios on KOVR Drive in West Sacramento; KOVR's transmitter is located in Walnut Grove, California.
After an application process stretching back to 1948, KOVR began broadcasting in September 1954 from studios in Stockton and a transmitter atop Mount Diablo. This facility provided wide coverage from San Francisco to Sacramento and beyond, but KOVR could not obtain a network affiliation in the San Francisco market, and it had to pay higher programming costs as a San Francisco station. To remedy these issues, the station moved transmitter sites in 1957, becoming fully a Stockton- and Sacramento-area station, and obtained an affiliation with ABC. It partly merged with Sacramento's original ABC affiliate, KCCC-TV, a struggling UHF station.
After moving, the station was sold twice before being acquired by newspaper publisher McClatchy in 1963. This made KOVR a sister to the KFBK radio stations in Sacramento as well as The Sacramento Bee newspaper; it marked McClatchy's entry into local television after an unsuccessful attempt to win channel 10 in the 1950s. McClatchy sold the station in 1980 under intense government pressure on owners of newspaper-broadcast combinations, and it changed hands another six times from 1983 to 1996. The station became a CBS affiliate in 1995 as the result of an affiliation switch and was purchased by CBS in 2005; uniquely, it broadcasts prime time programming one hour ahead of other West Coast stations. Traditionally a third-rated station in local news, ratings have gradually improved for its newscasts since the 1990s.
History
The Mount Diablo years
On March 5, 1948, Radio Diablo, Inc. filed an application for a new television station to broadcast on channel 13, first assigned to San Francisco and then to San Jose, from Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County. From Mount Diablo, the principals in Radio Diablo operated FM station KSBR, which had an effective radiated power of 250,000 watts and, having just moved to the mountaintop, claimed it was heard from the Oregon state line to Bakersfield. Two other groups applied for the channel by late 1948, but the Federal Communications Commission imposed a freeze on new television station grants that October.When the freeze ended in 1952, channel 13 had been removed from San Jose to Stockton, where it could still cover the city of license from Mount Diablo. Stockton radio station KXOB filed a competing application for channel 13. Radio Diablo, headed by O. H. Brown, estimated it could serve 3.5 million people in San Francisco, Stockton, and Sacramento from its mountaintop site. The owners of KXOB ultimately received shares in Radio Diablo in exchange for the dismissal of KXOB's competing application in a settlement agreement. Broadcaster and furniture store owner Edward Peffer entered into a similar agreement, paving the way for the FCC to grant Radio Diablo the construction permit on February 11, 1954. Leslie Hoffman, who had become the new president of the company, was to have the station named for him as KHOF, but when Hoffman thought of the possibility of "cough" puns based on the designation, the call sign was changed to KOVR, for "coverage".
KOVR began broadcasting September 6, 1954; after an opening night telecast produced in the Stockton studios, it aired live coverage from the California State Fair. It had studios in Stockton on Miner Avenue, as well as a converted bus that served as a remote broadcast van along with two other mobile units. KOVR was the second television station in Stockton; an ultra high frequency outlet, KTVU, had gone on the air the previous December.
As an independent station without network affiliation, the program schedule was heavy with local programming. Lynn Taylor hosted a talent show, a weeknight "Do It Yourself" show, and a teen program. Sportscaster Bob Fouts began commuting to Stockton from San Francisco to host a sports show, leaving KGO-TV in that city, and regional news coverage and a bingo program were also slated. Art Finley hosted an afternoon children's program, Toonytown, on the station for several years before moving to San Francisco's KRON-TV.
By 1955, the station had opened offices in San Francisco, where at one point it was proposed that NBC might try to affiliate with or purchase KOVR given discord with KRON-TV, its San Francisco affiliate, and a desire by NBC to own its San Francisco outlet. An attempt to move its main operation from Stockton to San Francisco was denied by the FCC as it would have stripped Stockton of its lone very high frequency television station and there were already several television channels allotted to the Bay Area. The company did announce it would add a studio in San Francisco on a secondary basis. This studio was located in the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where the San Francisco offices were also relocated. In December 1955, Variety magazine reported that CBS, which coveted a VHF owned-and-operated station to serve San Francisco but had affiliate KPIX-TV there instead, was bidding on KOVR.
As time went on, it became clear that a network affiliation was necessary to provide KOVR with adequate programming and secure its economic viability. Bob Foster, the media critic for The Times newspaper in San Mateo, described the station as "suffering from the lack of sponsors, the lack of network affiliation—at least one that meant anything—and from a lack of good programs". DuMont ceased operating as a network in 1955, but KOVR continued to carry the network's sole remaining program, Boxing from St. Nicholas Arena. The station found itself paying for films and syndicated programs at San Francisco market rates while selling advertising at rates befitting its city of license, the much smaller Stockton; if it were to move out of the San Francisco market, it could cut its film acquisition costs by half. KOVR had no prospect of obtaining a network alliance in the San Francisco market. However, opportunity lay in Sacramento. By 1956, there were three television stations in Sacramento itself. On the VHF band were CBS affiliate KBET-TV and NBC affiliate KCRA-TV, which had begun the year before, and a UHF station, KCCC-TV, which was the local outlet for ABC and had been in service since 1953. As not all television sets could receive UHF, UHF stations were generally at a disadvantage to VHF stations, which networks and advertisers preferred to air their programming. In a bid to obtain the ABC affiliation while eliminating overlap to ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, KOVR filed in August 1956 to move from Mount Diablo to Butte Mountain near Jackson in Amador County, a proposal that blindsided KCCC-TV. This application was initially approved by the FCC in November, though KCCC-TV management protested the decision as a Stockton station encroaching on the Sacramento market. As a result, the FCC stayed its grant of the construction permit in January 1957.
KOVR blindsided KCCC-TV again in February 1957 when it announced that, beginning February 17, it would become an ABC affiliate, something that the network had previously promised KCCC-TV as not forthcoming until after the Butte Mountain move was approved. The relocation application was granted again in April after KCCC-TV withdrew its opposition.
On May 31, 1957, KCCC-TV ceased broadcasting in what amounted to a partial merger with KOVR. The Stockton station became the ABC affiliate of record for Sacramento—already simulcasting many ABC programs with channel 40—as KCCC-TV owner Lincoln Dellar purchased stock in Television Diablo. The move to Butte Mountain became effective on October 28, 1957, taking KOVR out of conflict with the Bay Area television stations and cementing its status as a Stockton station serving Sacramento instead of San Francisco.
Gannett and Metromedia ownership
As work continued on the Butte Mountain transmitter, Television Diablo began to seek a buyer for KOVR. It first proposed to sell the station to the Hudson Valley Broadcasting Company of Albany, New York—which was in the process of buying a television station in Durham, North Carolina, and renaming itself the Capital Cities Broadcasting Company; despite the FCC's approval, this sale was not consummated and was dismissed in November. Weeks later, the Gannett Company of Rochester, New York, entered into an agreement to acquire the station, taking ownership in February 1958. For Gannett, KOVR was far-flung compared to its other media properties. It owned radio and television stations in New York and Illinois as well as newspapers in those states, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The next year, KOVR reopened KCCC-TV's former Sacramento studios on Garden Highway, also providing use of the facilities by new educational station KVIE.After less than two years of ownership, as well as the end of talks between Gannett and 20th Century Fox, Gannett applied to sell KOVR to the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company, owned by John Kluge, in 1959. This company renamed itself Metromedia in 1961. During Metromedia's ownership of KOVR, the station participated in the Trans-Tower project that built a common transmission facility for Sacramento's three commercial television stations in Walnut Grove. Expanding production of commercials and other programming in Sacramento eventually led KOVR to leave the Garden Highway facilities and renovate a former Red Heart bakery on Arden Way to serve as its Sacramento studio and news center, operating alongside the Miner Avenue plant in Stockton.
The McClatchy years
On October 4, 1963, Metromedia announced it would sell KOVR for $7.65 million to McClatchy Newspapers, publisher of The Sacramento Bee and The Modesto Bee newspapers and owner of radio stations KBEE in Modesto and KFBK and KFBK-FM 92.5 in Sacramento. For McClatchy, the contract to buy a television station serving Sacramento fulfilled a long-held dream of the company. McClatchy had desired to build a station in Sacramento since 1948, when it applied for channel 10. While an FCC examiner's initial decision favored McClatchy for the station, its competition, a group known as Sacramento Telecasters and consisting of non-broadcast interests, successfully objected the award on diversification of media ownership grounds, with the FCC unanimously overturning the examiner and granting Sacramento Telecasters the permit for what signed on as KBET-TV. McClatchy continued legal action to try and force a rehearing on its proposal until February 1958.Several groups expressed concern about concentration of media ownership. The sale was initially opposed by a group calling itself the Citizens Committee to Promote Fair Coverage, which felt that a McClatchy purchase of KOVR would result in a "monopoly of news", while the Stockton city council, fearful of the station reducing its presence in its city of license, initially voted unanimously to request an FCC hearing before rescinding the resolution after Eleanor McClatchy wrote to the body, assuring them that the station would not leave. The FCC initially indicated the deal would require a hearing, an action recommended by commission staff, but reversed course in July 1964, approving the acquisition on a 5–2 vote.
McClatchy's ownership of KOVR was dogged by groups seeking to force the matter on antitrust issues as early as the late 1960s. In 1969, McKeon Construction, a Sacramento firm, asked a U.S. district court to void the FCC's 1964 approval of the sale, which it claimed enhanced an existing monopoly on regional advertising; McClatchy sources told Broadcasting magazine that the firm's ire had likely been provoked by unflattering coverage of its owner and of political pressures placed by Sacramento construction companies. The lawsuit was dropped in 1971. Similarly, in 1974, the San Joaquin County Economic Development Association appealed to the FCC and asked it to review whether KOVR was adequately serving Stockton.