KXTX-TV
KXTX-TV is a television station licensed to Dallas, Texas, United States, serving as the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex with programming from the Spanish-language network Telemundo. It is owned and operated by NBCUniversal's Telemundo Station Group alongside NBC outlet KXAS-TV. The two stations share studios at the CentrePort Business Park in Fort Worth; KXTX-TV's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.
Channel 39 in Dallas began broadcasting as KDTV on February 5, 1968. It was built by Doubleday Broadcasting Co., a subsidiary of publisher Doubleday and Company, and operated as an English-language independent station emphasizing business news and sports coverage. It struggled to gain ratings traction in the market, and by 1973, it was the only unprofitable station Doubleday owned. As a result, Doubleday sought to give the station away to a non-profit entity. The Christian Broadcasting Network, which had just entered the market on channel 33, acquired KDTV and moved its station, KXTX-TV, to channel 39, occupying channel 39's studios on Harry Hines Boulevard. CBN primarily programmed religious and family-friendly entertainment shows, though it began to broaden the appeal of its program lineup in the early 1980s to be more competitive in the market. It attempted to sell the station twice in the decade, but no sale eventuated.
Beginning in June 1994, KXAS-TV began operating and programming KXTX-TV under a local marketing agreement. Channel 39 began serving as overflow for pre-empted NBC programming, and for six months in 1995 it was the market's affiliate of The WB. Beginning in 1996, the station aired Texas Rangers baseball games as part of a wide-ranging contract between the team and KXAS-TV owner LIN Media. LIN was purchased in 1997 by private equity firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst; one of the firm's principals, Tom Hicks, bought the Rangers and also owned the Dallas Stars hockey team. The next year, LIN transferred its operating agreement to a new sports business controlled by Hicks, Southwest Sports Group. Southwest Sports Group analyzed using channel 39 as the centerpiece of a regional sports network for Rangers and Stars games but ultimately decided to sell the teams' media rights to Fox Sports Southwest.
In 2000, Southwest Sports acquired the license from CBN and immediately attempted to sell KXTX-TV to Pappas Telecasting, which would have used it as a key station in its planned Azteca América network. Financing difficulties delayed the network's launch and caused the deal to collapse. Telemundo then stepped in to buy KXTX, which replaced KFWD as the network's outlet in the Metroplex on January 1, 2002. At the same time, NBC bought Telemundo; channel 39 moved from Dallas to KXAS-TV's Fort Worth studios in 2006. The station produces local Spanish-language newscasts as well as a morning news program seen on Telemundo stations across Texas.
KDTV
On February 1, 1966, Trigg-Vaughn Stations Inc. applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a construction permit to build a new TV station on ultra high frequency channel 39 in Dallas. Trigg-Vaughn owned radio stations in several Western states as well as two TV stations in Texas: KROD-TV in El Paso and KOSA-TV in Odessa. The FCC granted Trigg-Vaughn the permit on June 2. KDTV was a station on paper only when Trigg-Vaughn sold its entire station group to Doubleday in February 1967.Construction of KDTV took place during 1967 and early 1968. The station would broadcast from a tower in Cedar Hill, the primary TV transmission site in the region, and maintain studios at 3900 Harry Hines Boulevard near downtown Dallas. KDTV's construction also coincided with a boom in new UHF stations in the Metroplex; two additional stations, KFWT-TV on channel 21 and KMEC-TV on channel 33, went on the air in late 1967.
KDTV began broadcasting on February 5, 1968. The new station's programming consisted broadly of three elements. During the day, KDTV offered Stock Market Observer, a rolling block of business news and information for investors, using equipment developed by Scantlin Electronics. Scantlin also supplied a wire of stories from The Wall Street Journal for the program, which first began airing on a station in Chicago the year before. The station also featured a variety of local sports events; Frank Filesi served as its first sports director. In the first year, channel 39 carried Dallas Chaparrals basketball, Dallas Blackhawks hockey, Dallas–Fort Worth Spurs baseball, and Dallas Tornado soccer. In addition, KDTV offered public affairs show 3900 Harry Hines and alternative news coverage alongside syndicated shows and movies.
On May 7, 1969, a windstorm knocked down the original Cedar Hill tower. KDTV was off the air for a total of twelve days; the replacement tower was completed in late October. The station continued with its mix of programming for several years. In 1972, it was the first television broadcast partner of the new Texas Rangers baseball team, leading a 12-station TV network and airing 26 Sunday and Wednesday contests; however, the team moved its games to KDFW-TV in 1973.
Channel 39 struggled under Doubleday. The station failed to make headway against Fort Worth–based KTVT, the primary independent station in the region; by 1972, it had four percent of the market, while KTVT commanded 17 percent. It lost nearly $2 million in each of its first two years of broadcasting; while the other Doubleday Broadcasting stations were said to be "substantially profitable" by 1972, KDTV was the lone exception. A 1972 feature on Doubleday & Co. in The New York Times cited Dallas business leaders in finding that the station lacked leadership and broadcasting expertise in management. The stock market programming, which had been a fixture of KDTV since it debuted, was discontinued at the end of March 1973; Turner, who had left as general manager of channel 39 the year before, bought the rights to the program and formed the National Business Network to market it.
Christian Broadcasting Network ownership
Doubleday donation
As a result of KDTV's poor financial condition and a failure to sell the station, Doubleday began negotiating to transfer it to a non-profit organization, with four groups vying over the course of June 1973 to receive the donation. Of these, two were educational broadcasters. The Dallas Independent School District had been airing instructional programs over KERA-TV, and the district entered into talks with Doubleday. If DISD acquired the station, it would have moved all of its programs for schools to channel 39, which would deprive KERA-TV of a vital source of revenue. KERA-TV itself expressed interest in acquiring channel 39, not only as a secondary outlet for its programming but also to move its television production facility to 3900 Harry Hines and leave its existing studios for use by the then-planned KERA FM. However, in the donation from Doubleday, KERA would also have had to take on $1.2 million in KDTV's programming contracts, consisting of programming incompatible with its public television format, and a 20-year studio lease. Nonetheless, KERA intensively lobbied for the channel, going as far as to enlist the help of journalist and PBS show host Bill Moyers to present its proposal.The other two entrants each had religious orientation. The Trinity Foundation had been formed as an outgrowth of a recent prayer breakfast; president Ole Anthony told The Dallas Morning News, "Our purpose is communicating in any way possible the love, grace and sufficiency of Jesus Christ." Trinity also proposed giving airtime to Dallas schools for educational programs and nighttime programming to reach "unchurched" viewers. The other applicant was the Christian Broadcasting Network, which had recently entered Dallas by buying from Berean Fellowship and reactivating the then-silent channel 33, which returned to air as KXTX-TV on April 16. Much like CBN's two other TV outlets—WYAH-TV in Portsmouth, Virginia, and WHAE-TV in Atlanta—the station aired a lineup of general entertainment fare during the daytime and early evening and shifting to religious shows, including CBN's own The 700 Club, in prime time and on Sundays.
On June 27, CBN announced that it had been chosen to take on the KDTV facilities, programming and contractual obligations, and channel 39 license; CBN founder Pat Robertson estimated the network would pay $2.9 million over 10 years, nearly half of that in film contracts from KDTV, and announced its plans to merge KXTX-TV's staff and programming with that of KDTV in the channel 39 studios. Robertson promised that the transaction represented "not the demise of one station but a combination of two". CBN also declared an intention to transfer the channel 33 facility and license to another nonprofit. This never came to pass; instead, channel 33 went dark, and on November 14, 1973, KXTX-TV moved to channel 39 on the former KDTV license. The network had previously announced that when the combination became effective, the merged channel 39 would expand its broadcast day.
CBN maintained a generally conservative editorial and program policy at its stations. This was typified in its 1979 decision to remove evangelist Ernest Angley from the KXTX-TV programming lineup after five years. Station management reported that they had received multiple comments about Angley's style, which station manager Roger Baerwolf called "controversial" and "effeminate".
Seeking a broader audience
At the end of the 1970s, KXTX-TV began broadening its program offerings in an attempt to reach a wider audience and shed an image that channel 39 exclusively provided religious programming. For one week in May 1979, the station aired a television simulcast of Ron Chapman's morning show on KVIL radio, which was scheduled immediately after an airing of CBN's The 700 Club. It also beefed up its coverage of sports; Filesi returned to channel 39 as sports coordinator and led an increase in live sports coverage as well as a new monthly sports anthology program, TV 39 Sports Magazine, hosted by sportscaster Frank Glieber. However, CBN's policy of barring alcohol advertising hindered the station as a sports player. In launching the Independent Network News on channel 39 in June 1980, Baerwolf noted that the changes were also designed to help the station be a competitive independent in the market. Most notably, the station advertised its new turn with billboards heralding the arrival of reruns of Wonder Woman.The station served the teens and children's market with some of the most popular syndicated shows in television among those audiences. It ventured as far as to air the syndicated The Uncle Floyd Show in late-night hours in 1982; the syndicator provided a special edit to conform with channel 39's content standards. However, KXTX-TV's deemphasis of religion—by 1984, The 700 Club was airing just once a day in prime time—left a lane open for a new, more purely religious television station in the Metroplex. In 1984, Eldred Thomas started KLTJ-TV, a Christian station using Trinity Broadcasting Network programming. Thomas told Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News, "Had remained Christian, we would not have started another Christian station."
In the 1980s, the market swelled locally and contracted regionally. In a six-month span, three new commercial independent stations went on the air: KNBN in 1980 and KTXA and KTWS-TV in 1981. These new startups joined KTVT and KXTX-TV to give Dallas–Fort Worth five independent stations, the most of any market in the country; in this battle, channels 27 and 39 lagged in their available cash to buy programs. KXTX-TV, with its vast regional cable carriage, began to lose it in the early 1980s due to changes in copyright law and other factors. Beginning in January 1983, the Copyright Royalty Tribunal raised the rates that cable companies had to pay for importing out-of-market signals by 375 percent. However, KXTX was somewhat insulated from this issue because the FCC continued to classify it as a "specialty channel" due to its religious program orientation. When the FCC moved to reclassify KXTX as a conventional independent effective at the end of 1990, the station was dropped from cable systems in cities including Wichita Falls, Longview, and Marshall. For other reasons, KXTX lost its coverage in more far-flung places, including Tulsa, Oklahoma—where it was replaced by co-owned CBN Cable in 1982—and Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1988.
In 1984, CBN—renamed Continental Broadcasting Network—put KXTX-TV and its Continental Productions syndication division on the market. The move came at a time when several new-to-market UHF stations in the Metroplex had been sold, including KNBN-TV in 1983 and KTWS-TV and KTXA in 1984. However, CBN withdrew the station when bids came in lower than expected. Two years later, citing a drop in projected donations, the network tried again to sell the three stations it still owned: KXTX-TV, WYAH-TV, and WXNE-TV in Boston. In its second attempt to sell channel 39, CBN was hampered by expensive, long-term syndicated program contracts that caused interest in the station to lag. After WXNE-TV was sold to the Fox network, Family Group Broadcasting of Tampa, Florida, bid on WYAH and KXTX. A sale was announced in October, but within a month, Family Group rescinded its offer, citing changes in tax law that made the deal impossible to finance via a stock sale. Shortly after, the market for independent stations grew colder, particularly in the wake of the bankruptcy filing of the Grant Broadcasting System.
During the 1980s, the station produced World Class Championship Wrestling, featuring Fritz Von Erich; the wrestling promotion, at its height in the early part of the decade, aired in more than 60 markets and in Japan, Argentina, and the Middle East. Wrestling was the station's biggest single ratings draw, and Robertson accepted its place in channel 39's lineup because it also featured the highest advertising rates on the station. In the spring of 1986, KXTX reached an agreement with WFAA-TV to carry ABC prime time programming preempted by that station; this arrangement was short-lived as a result of a situation on April 16 involving delays in ABC prime time programming due to a special report. The station continued to specialize in family-friendly programs—CBN described the lineup in official material as "programs which can be viewed by people of all ages without their becoming offended"—and weekend western movies.