KSHB-TV
KSHB-TV is a television station in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company alongside Lawrence, Kansas–licensed independent station KMCI-TV. The two stations share studios on Oak Street in southern Kansas City, Missouri; KSHB-TV's transmitter is located along the Blue River Greenway in the city's Hillcrest neighborhood.
Channel 41 in Kansas City began broadcasting after years of delays as KBMA-TV on September 28, 1970. Owned by and named for the Business Men's Assurance Company, it was the second independent station for Kansas City to sign on the air within twelve months. However, it outlasted competitor KCIT-TV thanks to its superior financial backing and was the primary independent in the market in the 1970s and 1980s, airing syndicated reruns, movies, and local sports with occasional forays into local news programming. Scripps acquired majority control of the station in 1977 and renamed the station KSHB-TV four years later upon its relocation into its present studio facilities. It joined the Fox network at its inception in 1986 and debuted its first full-length news program in 1993.
An affiliation switch in 1994 converted KSHB-TV into the market's NBC affiliate as WDAF-TV became the new Fox affiliate. The station quadrupled its news staff, expanded its facilities, and modified its news format as a result of the change. However, it took years for the station to have much traction in the local news ratings, and it experienced turnover in personnel, management, and strategy.
History
KBMA-TV: Early years
In 1964 and 1965, the Federal Communications Commission received a series of applications proposing new television stations on channel 25 in Kansas City, a channel that had lay fallow since the 1954 closure of KCTY. The first came from Hawthorn Television of Chicago, which was soon joined by Westport Television—led by William D. Grant, the president of the Business Men's Assurance Company —as well as Midway Television of Rockford, Illinois, a subsidiary of Massachusetts-based Springfield Television, and another local group, Allied Television.The rapidly shifting field was also affected by two national overhauls of the UHF table of allocations in the span of a year. The channel 25 field was essentially split to two new channel assignments, 30 and 36. In October 1965, Westport got the construction permit for channel 30. It was revised again in early 1966 to specify channel 41. KBMA-TV, named for Business Men's Assurance, continued to exist only on paper for another four and a half years after being assigned to channel 41. By the time Allied's station—which was reassigned channel 50 and began as KCIT-TV in October 1969—began broadcasting and gave Kansas City its first independent station, the station was still unbuilt and needed yet more time due to a local construction strike. It had not been able to find land for a studio site in Kansas City, Missouri, and had tentatively agreed to construct facilities in Fairway, Kansas, requiring FCC approval.
The picture finally came into focus in 1970. The transmitter facility was built on WDAF-TV's tower, while station offices were located on the 18th floor of the BMA Tower. The station was automated, an innovation for that period, with a computer preparing station logs and switching video inputs. The first telecast was made on the afternoon of September 28, 1970: after a welcome message from general manager Bob Wormington, the first program was the live cartoon show 41 Treehouse Lane, featuring host Ed Muscare. Within a year, Kansas City had gone from being the largest U.S. market without an independent station to having two of them run by twin brothers. It almost did not turn out this way. In late 1969 and early 1970, negotiations had taken place between Allied and Westport Television. Shortly before KCIT began broadcasting, Grant proposed to buy a controlling stake in KCIT-TV, donate the studio equipment purchased for KBMA-TV and the channel 50 physical plant to local public television station KCSD-TV to become a two-channel operation, and move KCIT-TV to channel 41. He then later proposed merging the two stations on channel 50 and donating channel 41 to the University of Missouri. Stockholders in KCIT-TV rebuffed both overtures. Within a year, however, KCIT-TV was out of business. It left the air on July 8, 1971, citing a poor economy as its reason to shut down. The move bolstered channel 41, now the only independent in the market, which moved to pick up the preempted network programs channel 50 had carried in the Kansas City area and some of its syndicated programming inventory.
Benno C. Schmidt of New York acquired controlling interest in the station in 1971, with BMA remaining a major creditor. The insurer then repurchased a minority stake in Westport Television in 1975. The station continued to be a technical innovator. In 1974, it engaged in a plan to feed Kansas City Royals home telecasts to cable systems in 12 states. This business grew into a separate company, known as Target Network Television, by 1975. In 1976, it filed the first application by any TV station for a satellite earth station, becoming the second station in the United States to use one.
During the 1970s, channel 41 offered a wide variety of programming. When the Royals brought their television and radio operation in-house in 1972, KBMA-TV was selected as the originating station for the television network. By 1975, it was the broadcast home of Royals baseball, Kansas City Kings basketball, and Kansas City Scouts hockey; the Royals remained on channel 41 through 1979, moving to WDAF-TV. Muscare continued as a host of horror and daytime movies before leaving in 1977.
Schmidt and BMA sold Westport Television in 1977 to Scripps-Howard Broadcasting, the radio and television division of the E. W. Scripps Company, for $7.5 million. Its first order of business was to construct a proper studio facility; KBMA-TV had been producing programs in facilities located near the BMA Tower, which only contained its offices. In May 1978, the company obtained approval to construct studios at Brush Creek and Oak on a site of land where neighbors had previously rejected a proposed post office; Scripps-Howard had considered and rejected sites at Crown Center and in Overland Park, Kansas.
KSHB-TV: The independent and Fox years
On September 28, 1981, coinciding with the station's move into the completed Oak Street facility, the station's call letters were changed from KBMA-TV to KSHB-TV, representing owner Scripps-Howard Broadcasting. The call sign change coincided with a more aggressive programming attitude led by Wormington, which included increased local programming not possible without the larger facilities, which included two studios. One of these new local programs was All Night Live, wraparound segments around films and classic reruns in the overnight hours; Muscare returned to the station as host. A similar program in the late morning hours, A.M. Live, debuted in September 1982. By this time, channel 41 had grown into a regional superstation with the spread of cable television in mid-America; it was seen in 600,000 cable households from Iowa to Arkansas.The 1980s saw increased competition. For the first time since 1971, the market had two independent stations after the December 1983 launch of KEKR-TV on channel 62. However, that station initially failed to spend adequately on programming and did not attract much attention in the market. KSHB-TV local programs included the Kings, who remained on the station even though they failed to attract significant advertising revenue; they departed KSHB-TV after 10 years for KEKR-TV in the 1984–85 season. At the same time, the station's regional cable coverage was waning. At the end of 1985, the cable systems in Wichita, Kansas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, removed channel 41 from their lineups, citing program duplication to other services; the loss of the Royals, the original reason for their addition in Wichita; copyright fees the systems paid to broadcast the distant station; and poor reception of KSHB-TV by microwave.
KSHB became a charter affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company when that network launched on October 9, 1986. The station had stronger programming with more first-run shows as a result of the Fox affiliation and a changing syndication market. Wormington retired at the end of 1992, capping a 22-year run at channel 41 in which he had started and led the station, helped found the National Association of Independent Television Stations, and risen to vice chairman of the Fox affiliate board of governors.
Wormington's replacement was Charlotte Moore English, the first woman and first Black person to be a general manager in Kansas City broadcast history. English oversaw the rollout of a full-length local newscast, which debuted on August 1, 1993.
As an NBC affiliate
On May 23, 1994, as a result of Fox outbidding CBS for the rights to partial rights to the National Football League, New World Communications reached an agreement with Fox parent News Corporation in which the latter company purchased a 20 percent equity interest and reached a multi-year affiliation agreement with New World. Under the terms of the deal, New World would affiliate twelve of the television stations that the company had either owned outright or was in the process of acquiring—specifically those affiliated with one of the "Big Three" networks—with the Fox network, once individual affiliation contracts with each of the stations' existing network partners expired. The only NBC affiliate among the twelve stations was WDAF-TV. Earlier in the month, New World had announced the purchase of WDAF-TV from Great American Communications alongside three other major-market stations.The result was that NBC needed a new affiliate in the Kansas City market and KSHB-TV was left without a network affiliation. Scripps owned three Fox affiliates, all of which lost the network in the New World switches. The other two local stations—CBS affiliate KCTV, owned by Meredith Corporation, and Hearst-owned and ABC-affiliated KMBC-TV—both re-signed with their respective networks. In the case of the former, Meredith stood ready to flip KCTV to NBC if CBS bypassed its Phoenix TV station, KPHO-TV, in a market where CBS was the displaced network.
In late July, Scripps signed an affiliation agreement with NBC. The switch was set for September 12, 1994, kickstarting a frantic month of changes in programming and personnel at KSHB-TV and WDAF-TV. A newsroom that had 18 employees had to grow to more than 70 in order to begin the production of early evening newscasts by the end of 1994. Plans were also floated to construct an addition to the Oak Street studio, which was approved in 1996. Dozens of syndicated programs were displaced in the market, particularly at KSHB-TV, which had to make room for NBC's larger program schedule; Fox Kids programs were not picked up by WDAF-TV and instead went to KSMO-TV. A.M. Live also ended its twelve-year run on the air. On the first day of the switch, Willard Scott broadcast the weather for The Today Show from the front lawn of the studios; later that week, Tom Brokaw anchored the NBC Nightly News from Kansas City.
In April 1996, Scripps-Howard Broadcasting took over the operations of KMCI in Lawrence, Kansas, under a local marketing agreement with then-owner Miller Television; that August, the station dropped its home shopping programming and relaunched as "38 Family Greats", in part utilizing programming to which channel 41 had held the rights but had not been able to air since the 1994 affiliation switch. Exercising an option from the 1996 pact with Miller, Scripps bought KMCI outright for $14.6 million in 2000, forming a legal duopoly with KSHB. In July 2003, KSHB and KMCI relocated their transmitter facilities to an tower at the Blue River Greenway in the Hillcrest section of southern Kansas City.
KSHB-TV was the primary NBC affiliate for St. Joseph—within range of its transmitter but defined as a separate media market—from 1994 until 2016, when KNPG-LD was relaunched as an NBC affiliate and displaced KSHB-TV from local satellite TV packages. Suddenlink Communications, the primary cable provider in St. Joseph, then removed KSHB-TV from its lineup in 2017.
A jury found in 2019 that KSHB-TV retaliated against former reporter Lisa Benson Cooper, who is Black; she was fired in 2018 after suing Scripps two years prior, alleging she had been passed over for job opportunities because of her race. Scripps alleged that she had not applied for the positions and cited other reasons, including social media posts, for her suspension and termination. Though the jury awarded damages on the retaliation claim stemming from her firing, it found against her claim of racial discrimination. A second discrimination suit was filed by Demetrice "Dee" Jackson, who alleged that he had been passed over twice in favor of White men after applying to be sports director; this was settled out of court in February 2020, after the station released Jackson in late 2019.