KXAS-TV
KXAS-TV is a television station licensed to Fort Worth, Texas, United States, serving the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It is owned and operated by the NBC television network through its NBC Owned Television Stations division. Under common ownership with Telemundo outlet KXTX-TV, the two stations share studios at the CentrePort Business Park in eastern Fort Worth; KXAS-TV's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.
History
Early history under Carter Publications
—the founding publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—first submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission for a license to build and operate a television station on VHF channel 5 in late October 1944, mere days after Karl Hoblitzelle, owner of Interstate Circuit Theatres, filed an application to operate a station on channel 8 on October 23, the first such license application for a television station in the Southern United States. When the FCC awarded the construction permit for Channel 5 to Carter on June 21, 1946, he originally requested to assign KCPN as the station's call letters; three months before it signed on, however, Carter chose instead to assign the television station the calls that were used by the radio station that he also owned, WBAP.The station began test broadcasts on September 15, 1948, which was received from 5 cities. Channel 5 informally signed on the air as WBAP-TV on September 27, to broadcast coverage of President Harry S. Truman's re-election campaign speech at the Texas & Pacific terminal building in downtown Fort Worth. WBAP-TV officially commenced regular programming two days later on September 29, 1948, with two 10-minute specials at 7 p.m. that evening, respectively featuring speeches from Carter and general manager Harold Hough and a film from NBC dedicating the station's launch. Carter owned the television and radio properties through the Star-Telegrams corporate parent, Carter Publications. It was the first television station to sign on in the state of Texas; the second to be located between Los Angeles, St. Louis and Richmond, Virginia ; and the 25th to sign on in the United States.
When the station made its formal debut, its first night of regular broadcasts did not go smoothly. On the date of its sign-on, the station's studio facilities were in the latter stages of construction; at one point, Amon Carter accidentally stepped into an unmarked hole in the studio floor that led to the building's basement, narrowly saved from enduring potential injury by Star-Telegram cartoonist Johnny Hay. A power outage near the transmitter facility also knocked WBAP-TV off the air for 17 minutes around 8 pm. Angry viewers subsequently called into the station, blaming engineers for an outage that was beyond their control; after the power problems were fixed, another viewer calling into the station complained to a receptionist about not being able to receive WBAP-TV's signal, not realizing that the television station could not be picked up through their radio receiver. Even still, Fort Worth Press reporter Jack Gordon wrote regarding the station's first night of programming that "part of Fort Worth's inaugural television show looked like our first roll of home movie film. But a good deal more of it was excellent – enough so to convince the stubbornest critic that television is here to stay."
Channel 5 originally operated from studio facilities located at 3900 Barnett Street in eastern Fort Worth. The building—located in an area known as Broadcast Hill—was the first studio facility in the United States that was designed specifically for television broadcasting; the tower that transmitted its signal was also based on the studio grounds. The station originally broadcast for four hours each evening on Wednesday through Saturdays, with test patterns airing during the late morning and late afternoon Monday through Saturdays; the station expanded its programming schedule to all seven days each week within six months, airing a cumulative total of between 35 and 40 hours of programming per week.
Originally serving as an affiliate, Channel 5 has carried programming from NBC since its sign-on—having inherited the affiliation through WBAP radio's longtime relationship with the television network's radio predecessor, the NBC Blue Network, with which it had been affiliated since 1927; however, it also maintained a secondary affiliation with ABC by way of a secondary affiliation that WBAP radio had begun maintaining with the ABC Radio Network, the direct successor to NBC Blue, when it and timeshare partner WFAA assumed the 570 AM frequency on an alternating basis in April 1947. The following year in 1949, WBAP-TV and WBAP, were joined by a sister station on radio, WBAP-FM. The WBAP calls reportedly stood for "We Bring a Program"; the call sign and their associated meaning were suggested by Herbert Hoover during his tenure as chairman of what was then the Federal Radio Commission prior to the radio station's sign-on in 1922; in reality, they were sequentially assigned with no meaning. Among the local programs that aired on Channel 5 in its early years included the Saturday night country music/dance program Barn Dance, music series Bobby Peters Jamboree and the children's programs See-Saw Zoo and Kitty's Playhouse.
When Channel 5 signed on, it was apparent that Dallas and Fort Worth were going to be collapsed into a single television market due to the close proximity of the two cities; despite the fact that Dallas and Tarrant counties bordered one another, Arbitron had initially designated their respective county seats as separate markets. However, Carter, who had long been a booster for the Fort Worth area, did not care whether Dallas residents could view Channel 5's broadcast signal, which provided rimshot coverage within most of central and eastern Dallas County, including Dallas proper. As a result, in 1950, NBC reached an agreement with A. H. Belo Corporation to switch the primary affiliation of DuMont affiliate WFAA-TV to NBC to serve as its affiliate for the eastern half of the market.
On July 1, 1952, WBAP-TV became among the first six television stations in the country to begin transmitting network programming over a live microwave feed, inaugurated with a message by Today Show host Dave Garroway welcoming the stations in commencing live network telecasts. That decade, Channel 5 also became one of the first television stations to convert its local programming to color; the station's conversion to color broadcasts on May 15, 1954, was preceded by a dedication of its new production and master control facilities—which were upgraded specifically for color telecasting—from Carter and David Sarnoff, chairman of then-NBC parent RCA, that was broadcast on the station; this was followed by a three-hour block of programs produced in color, the longest broadcast of such programs ever attempted by a television station at that time. By 1955, WBAP-TV—which had earlier ordered RCA color television equipment in the fall of 1949, and became the first television station in Texas to broadcast NBC programs in color on April 9, 1954—had greatly increased the number of programs that it broadcast in color, televising the largest amount of programming produced in the format of any U.S. television station at the time.
Ownership of Star-Telegram and the WBAP stations would transfer to Amon Carter Sr.'s heirs after he succumbed from the last of several heart attacks he had suffered over the previous two years on June 23, 1955. Meanwhile, NBC grew frustrated with having to maintain affiliations with two stations to carry its programming in an otherwise effectively consolidated market. In early 1957, a taller transmission tower was built at the west end of the Broadcast Hill studio property. However, NBC threatened to strip its affiliation from Channel 5 if it did not relocate its transmitter farther eastward to extend the station's signal deeper into the Dallas metropolitan area; reportedly, the network approached the owners of Fort Worth's other station, independent KFJZ-TV, which had in 1962 moved its transmitter to the antenna farm in Cedar Hill. Belo also made an attempt to make WFAA-TV the market's exclusive NBC affiliate. To prevent the network from defecting, Carter's heirs—who were reluctant to comply to NBC's demands at first, out of their desire to continue Amon Carter Sr.'s legacy of pro-Fort Worth civic boosterism—agreed to move WBAP-TV's transmitter facilities to Cedar Hill and boost its effective radiated power to adequately cover Dallas; in the summer of 1964, it installed a transmitter at the Hill Tower to feed the channel 5 antenna on a candelabra tower that was already shared by WFAA-TV and KRLD-TV ; sister station WBAP-FM also moved its transmitter to this location. The move to Cedar Hill allowed channel 5 to become the sole NBC affiliate for the entire Dallas–Fort Worth market on September 1, 1957, and subsequently, WFAA-TV became the area's exclusive ABC station. In October 1959, WBAP-TV installed the first color videotape recorder in Texas, allowing it the ability to record a 90-minute segment of programming and replay it in less than five minutes.
During NBC's coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, WBAP-TV transmitted news reports conducted from its Broadcast Hill studios on the sniper-range shooting at the Presidential motorcade carrying Kennedy and Governor John Connally in color; NBC broadcast the station's color feed during its coverage, which was otherwise transmitted in black and white from their New York studios. Charles Murphy, who served as an anchor at the station, relayed word of Kennedy's death during emergency surgery at Parkland Hospital that afternoon. Two days later on November 24, a remote unit that was loaned to WBAP-TV by KTVT management and set up at the Dallas Police Department's downtown headquarters, awaiting the transfer of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald to the Dallas County Jail, fed live images of the accused Presidential assassin being gunned down by nightclub owner Jack Ruby to the NBC network; it marked the first time that a murder had been witnessed live on U.S. network television. The station's coverage of the Kennedy assassination and his visit to Texas during which it occurred earned WBAP-TV a national Sigma Delta Chi television news award and a bronze medallion, and honors by the Dallas Press Club and the Radio-Television News Directors Association in 1964.