KSL-TV
KSL-TV is a television station in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is the sole television property of locally based Bonneville International, the for-profit broadcasting arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is sister to radio stations KSL and KSL-FM. The three stations share studios at the Broadcast House building in Salt Lake City's Triad Center; KSL-TV's transmitter is located on Farnsworth Peak in the Oquirrh Mountains, southwest of Salt Lake City. The station has a large [|network of broadcast translators] that extend its over-the-air coverage throughout Utah, as well as portions of Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.
KSL-TV is one of a few for-profit U.S. television stations owned by a religious institution.
History
Primary CBS affiliate
Radio Service Corporation of Utah, owner of KSL, filed the application to apply for a construction permit on May 26, 1948, and was granted on July 29. Television in Salt Lake City has been first conducted by KSL in 1946.The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1949, operating from studios in the Union Pacific Building on Main Street. It was owned by the Deseret News, who also owned KSL radio. It originally operated as a CBS affiliate, owing to its sister radio station's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. In addition to its primary CBS affiliation, the station also shared ABC programming with NBC affiliate KDYL-TV. The two stations continued to share ABC programming until KUTV signed on in September 1954 as the market's full-time ABC affiliate. The station also broadcast some programming from the DuMont Television Network, and during the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
A few months after its sign-on, KSL moved its operations to studio facilities at the Broadcast House on Social Hall Avenue. In 1952, a transmission tower was constructed on Farnsworth Peak to improve the station's signal coverage along the Wasatch Front and into Tooele County. It also began building a massive translator network that eventually stretched across five states.
When KSL first began broadcasting, all programs were produced locally or recorded content from out of the area. This changed in 1951, when AT&T completed their coast-to-coast microwave relay network allowing the station to tap into live television feeds from its affiliated networks. KSL first broadcast live network programming on September 30, 1951, with a broadcast of ABC's Paul Whiteman's Goodyear Revue. Prior to this, KSL had been producing 40 live shows weekly.
The KSL stations operated as a division of the Deseret News until 1964, when Bonneville International was formed as the parent company for the LDS Church's broadcasting holdings. Soon afterward, channel 5 began broadcasting its programming in color. In 1984, the station moved to its current facility at Triad Center, also named Broadcast House.
Switch to NBC affiliate
In July 1994, CBS and Westinghouse Broadcasting agreed to a long-term affiliation deal for the five Group W television stations, including longtime NBC affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia. That November, NBC agreed to trade their O&O stations KCNC-TV and KUTV to CBS in return for CBS' former O&O in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV, as a result of a complex ownership deal between the network, Westinghouse and NBC. NBC also traded their VHF channel 4 frequency and transmitter in Miami to CBS in exchange for the channel 6 frequency in Miami. The deal took effect on September 10, 1995, resulting in the first network affiliation switch in Salt Lake City since KTVX swapped affiliations with KUTV and became an ABC affiliate in 1960. Initially, NBC sought to reaffiliate with KTVX; but after that station renewed its affiliation agreement with ABC, NBC then secured an affiliation deal with KSL-TV. KUTV continued to air one NBC program, Saturday Night Live, for five more months until January 1996, when it was moved to then-WB affiliate KOOG-TV.On January 14, 1999, a shooter entered the station's Broadcast House facility, allegedly looking for a KSL-TV reporter. Anne Sleater, an employee of another company that was housed in the building, AT&T Wireless Services, was shot during the incident and later died from her injuries. De-Kieu Duy, a 24-year-old female, was arrested in connection with the shooting. Duy was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial and is currently housed in the Utah State Hospital.
In 2002, Bruce Christensen was named the president of KSL-TV; Christensen was a former president of PBS, the former dean of the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications, as well as a former KSL-TV reporter. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, KSL-TV was very influential in bringing coverage and technology to NBC. The station heavily lobbied to NBC that the Games be broadcast live locally.
In July 2010, KSL-TV entered into a local marketing agreement with independent station KJZZ-TV, after the LMA between that station and KUTV concluded after five years; the LMA was terminated in 2016, after KUTV's owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, purchased KJZZ.
Programming
In addition to locally produced news and sports programs, and syndicated shows, KSL broadcasts most of the programs seen on NBC's schedule.Due to its ties to the LDS Church, KSL-TV also airs programs relevant to Mormonism, such as History of the Saints, Music and the Spoken Word and Mormon Times, and preempts regularly scheduled programming to carry the twice yearly LDS General Conference. KSL-TV is one of the few remaining television stations in the United States that still "signs off" at night, doing so at 3:30 a.m. on Sundays.
Program preemptions and deferrals
Historically, KSL-TV has been known to occasionally preempt or assign out-of-pattern scheduling to certain network programs, either to make room for other local or syndicated programs or because of internal concerns over subject matter that station management deems objectionable, typically due to conflicts with to longstanding LDS Church beliefs. or KMYU Preemptions based on content objections have periodically led to inquiries over the sustainability of a religious institution owning a network-affiliated station as content standards and practices in broadcast television have relaxed in recent decades in a reflection of cultural change.As a CBS affiliate, in 1977, Match Game host Gene Rayburn mentioned that the often risque then-CBS daytime game show was not being aired in Salt Lake City. In 1987, the station was among several affiliates that announced that it would not air the children's animated series Garbage Pail Kids ahead of its originally scheduled premiere amid criticism from parental organizations over concerns about the show's violent content and humor ridiculing the handicapped and the perceived likelihood of it merely being a program-length ad for the controversial namesake toys and trading cards. In the years leading to its switch to NBC, KSL also preempted the 1989–91 sitcom Doctor Doctor, and three shorter-lived series—Dirty Dancing, prime time soap opera 2000 Malibu Road and adult-oriented sitcom Grapevine —because of their sexual content. KSL removed Picket Fences midway through its first season, partly due to objections over a January 1993 episode centering on a teenage girl who becomes pregnant through an incestuous plural marriage with a polygamist Mormon and the perpetrator's allusion that, although plural marriage within the LDS Church ceased after the 1890 Manifesto, many Mormons still held polygamist beliefs. The drama series returned to KSL in its normal network time slot in April 1993, before being shifted to a one-day delay at 11 p.m. Saturdays for its second season in September 1993. The station refused CBS' late night Crimetime After Primetime block from September 1990 until its discontinuation after the August 1993 premiere of Late Show with David Letterman, and preempted the network's Saturday morning children's program lineup after September 1989. It also was among several Mountain Time CBS stations that aired CBS This Morning and its predecessors on a one-hour-ahead basis until it shifted the morning show in-pattern in September 1994 to accommodate an expanded local morning newscast.
As an NBC affiliate, KSL declined to air Saturday Night Live throughout its first 18 years with the network; despite this, between 1995 and 2013, the station carried all of the long-running sketch comedy's "best-of" compilations, actor tributes, documentary specials and Saturday evening repeats that NBC aired in prime time. Unlike most of the later preemptions, while potentially objectionable content in the series were somewhat an issue for the station, the decision was largely made to retain its popular local sports discussion and highlight program SportsBeat Saturday. SNL initially remained on KUTV under arrangement with CBS until January 1996, before moving to then-WB affiliate KOOG. In June 2013, KSL announced that it would start airing SNL in its regular timeslot beginning that fall, after revealing that viewership for SportsBeat had declined in recent years ; the Utah Utes playing more later evening games against West Coast opponents following its 2011 shift to the Pac-12 Conference from the Mountain West Conference had also made it difficult for SportsBeat to analyze, carry, and package highlights of games that were often still in progress as it aired. KSL-TV also did not air the 1997–99 NBC daytime soap opera Sunset Beach; the soap was seen locally on KOOG instead.
Content-wise, Channel 5 declined the short-lived 2003 sitcom Coupling because of its sexual humor and content, and preempted much of NBC's poker programming due to Church, ownership and LDS-member viewers' objections toward gambling. In September 2011, KSL-TV also preempted The Playboy Club, on grounds that the fledgling drama was "completely inconsistent" with the station's mission and branding, not wanting to be associated with the Playboy brand, even though the program did not specifically focus on the magazine nor include any nudity. The program aired on KMYU in its Monday 9 p.m. time slot until it was canceled by NBC after its third episode. KSL continued to air already-recorded episodes of We Are Utah in the 9 p.m. slot until the October 31, 2011, premiere of Rock Center with Brian Williams. On August 24, 2012, KSL-TV preempted The New Normal on a Tuesday timeslot due to objections to the sitcom's storyline surrounding gay parenting, crude dialogue and potentially offensive characterizations. KUCW ran The New Normal instead in a Saturday night slot. In a twist, although the show was canceled after its first season in May 2013, The New Normal was the first NBC prime time show that KSL has declined to air since it joined the network in 1995 that lasted at least a full season.
On April 29, 2013, KSL-TV pulled Hannibal after four episodes, due to the drama's graphic violent content and material revolving around the Hannibal Lecter series of novels and films, an action compared by executive producer Bryan Fuller to how Russian newspaper Pravda structured its news coverage to fit the Soviet Communist Party's narrative. KUCW aired the program on Saturday nights, while Hannibals regular timeslot was occupied on Channel 5 by the weekly newsmagazine KSL In Depth. Hannibal was cancelled after its last episode in August 2015, and the station cleared NBC's entire seasonal prime time schedule for the first time in the 2015–16 season.
On September 4, 2013, KSL announced it was moving Days of Our Lives out of daytime to 1:05 a.m., leading out of the network's late-night talk lineup, effective September 9; a local lifestyle program replaced Days in its former 2 p.m. slot. Other than the plausible outcome that locally originated programming in the daytime hour could allow KSL to attain much more ad revenue with a local program, no reason for the move was explicitly stated, with a common theory floated for the move being a storyline involving openly gay characters Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis, citing historical opposition within the LDS Church to same-sex relationships. It also gave the show a steady DVR-friendly timeslot, where its preemption by breaking news in an overnight timeslot was much rarer than it would be in the afternoon, reducing overall station complaints. The latter reason is much more likely, as KSL continued to air Days in late night until the series moved exclusively to the Peacock streaming service in September 2022, even with the subsequent "killing off" and "resurrection" of Will in the series, and Sonny and Will's summer 2020 departure from the show. The NBC News Now-produced afternoon newscast NBC News Daily—which replaced Days on NBC's schedule upon the soap's shift to Peacock—was not carried by KSL during the 2022–23 season, due to existing timeslot commitments to air Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray; it began clearing the program in September 2023, after the two syndicated talk shows ended their runs.
Even with its tradition of screening possibly objectionable programs, some, such as The Book of Daniel and a paid political message criticizing the Iraq War have been aired by the station.