History
As a CBS affiliate
The Federal
Communications Commission awarded the license of Phoenix's third VHF
commercial station to two separate owners who competed heavily for its
construction permit. These two owners, one of whom was Gene
Autry,[1]
signed on channel 10 as a shared operation on October 24, 1953. Under
the arrangement, the two separate stations would each alternate airtime,
but use the same channel allocation and transmitter. The combined KOY-TV
and KOOL-TV operation operated as a primary CBS[2]
and secondary ABC
affiliate.
In 1954, KOOL-TV took over channel 10 full-time, absorbing KOY-TV's
share of the operation and ending the split-station arrangement. It lost
the ABC affiliation when KTVK
(channel 3) signed on in February 1955, leaving channel 10 as an
exclusive CBS affiliate; as a result, it was now able to feature Autry's
show Gene Autry's Melody Ranch on its schedule. Over the years,
KOOL-TV ran nearly the entire CBS schedule, along with some first-run
syndicated shows and local newscasts.
On May 28, 1982 at about 5 p.m., Joseph Billie Gwin, wanting to
"prevent World
War III", forced his way into the KOOL-TV studios and fired a
shot from his gun. The butt of the gun struck Louis Villa in the back of
the head, Gwin then held Villa in a chokehold, at gunpoint for nearly
five hours. Gwin took four people hostage and demanded nationwide
airtime. Two of the hostages, Jack Webb and Bob Cimino, were released
three hours later. At 9:30 p.m., anchor Bill Close read a 20-minute
statement as Gwin sat next to him holding a gun under the table, Close
took Gwin's gun after the statement and set it on the table.[3][4][5][6]
The station was sold to Gulf Broadcasting in 1982, and changed its
callsign to KTSP-TV (the KOOL call sign is currently used by an FM
radio station in Phoenix). It had been stated that the calls stood
for "Tempe/Scottsdale/Phoenix",
but it was also believed that the callsign was simply changed to match
that of then-sister station WTSP
in St.
Petersburg, Florida. The logo that KTSP used at the time, which
would remain in use until 1995, was similar to WTSP's "Sunset
10" logo (KTSP's logo was slightly modernized in the early 1990s,
losing the linear elements at the bottom).
KTSP was sold to Taft
Broadcasting in 1984, as part of a corporate deal; on October 12,
1987, Taft was restructured into Great American Broadcasting after the
company went through a hostile
takeover by investors. The station's operations did not change
significantly under Gulf, Taft or Great American Broadcasting ownership.
In 1989, KTSP newscaster Shelly
Jamison left the station after appearing as both a cover model and
posing nude in a Playboy
pictorial.[7]
When Great American Broadcasting filed Chapter
11 bankruptcy in 1993, the company restructured once again and
became known as Citicasters late that year. The station changed its
callsign to KSAZ-TV on February 12, 1994 to match its new slogan,
"The Spirit of Arizona".
As a Fox station
Due to the company's bankruptcy, Citicasters put four of its stations
(including KSAZ-TV) up for sale. KSAZ and Kansas
City sister station WDAF-TV
were sold to New
World Communications on May 5, 1994 for $360 million, with the sale
becoming final on September 9 of that year. New World also acquired High
Point, North Carolina's WGHP
and Birmingham,
Alabama's WBRC[8]
(both of those stations would be placed in a blind
trust, due to ownership complications, and were later sold directly
to Fox). Just 18 days later, New World announced that twelve of its 15
stations (those it already owned and those it was in the process of
acquiring, including the two that would later be sold to Fox) would switch
their varying Big
Three network affiliations (most of the New World stations, like
KSAZ, were aligned with CBS) to Fox.[9]
A major catalyst for the Fox-New World deal was the network's newly
signed contract
with the National
Football League's National
Football Conference. The Arizona
Cardinals franchise were part of the NFC, and thus, had their games
telecast on channel 10 since 1988, when that the Cardinals relocated to
Phoenix from St.
Louis (at that time, NFC games were shown
on CBS). Until recently, however, home game telecasts were hard to
come by, as the Cardinals often failed to sell out games at Sun
Devil Stadium. Since moving to University
of Phoenix Stadium, there have been no in-market blackouts.
As a result of the affiliation agreement, four commercial television
stations in the Phoenix market each swapped network affiliations at
different times. KSAZ dropped the CBS affiliation three days after the
sale to New World became final on September 12. This switch temporarily
left KSAZ as an independent
station as Fox's affiliation agreement with its existing affiliate KNXV-TV
(channel 15) did not expire until December 14 – as such, KSAZ was the
only station involved in the New World deal and Fox's other affiliation
agreements with Big Three stations that were byproducts of it that did
not switch to Fox directly from another network. The CBS affiliation at
that time went to former independent KPHO-TV
(channel 5).[2]
The ABC affiliation was to move from KTVK to KNXV on January 9, 1995 (as
part of a separate multi-station affiliation deal between ABC and KNXV's
owner, the E.
W. Scripps Company), however KNXV began to add ABC shows in stages
that August, as KTVK started to gradually excise that network's programs
from its schedule (ABC's primetime and sports programs were the only
network shows remaining on KTVK shortly before the affiliation formally
moved to KNXV). Fox's primetime and sports programming moved to channel
10 on December 15, 1994. As with most other New World stations, KSAZ
declined to run Fox
Kids programming, which instead moved to KTVK and then in 1996, to KASW
(channel 61).
KTVK originally chose to become a charter affiliate of The
WB upon its January 11, 1995 debut, but that network's programming
also went to KASW when it launched on September 22, 1995. With several
top-rated syndicated shows moving to other stations in 1995, KSAZ
dramatically increased the amount of local newscasts, producing about 45
hours each week. The remaining syndicated programs on the station were
rather low-rated, and as a result KSAZ did not have good ratings in its
early days as a Fox affiliate. Much of the audience for the station's
newscasts went to KTVK, which also took on a news-intensive format after
losing its ABC affiliation. In the fall of 1995, KSAZ added three hours
of syndicated talk shows jointly produced by New World and Fox.
News
Corporation purchased New World Communications, acquiring only its
ten Fox-affiliated stations, in July 1996;[10]
the merger was finalized on January 22, 1997, making KSAZ an owned-and-operated
station of Fox. This status almost became short-lived: in February
1997, Fox nearly traded KSAZ and sister station KTBC
in Austin,
Texas to the Belo
Corporation in exchange for Seattle's
KIRO-TV.[11]
That trade fell through; however, Belo would purchase KTVK (and KVUE
in Austin) two years later. Fox began to upgrade the station's
programming, adding some high-rated off-network sitcoms (such as M*A*S*H,
Seinfeld
and King
of the Hill) as well as higher-rated syndicated court and
reality shows.
Fox Television Stations purchased KUTP
(channel 45) in 2001 as part of its acquisition of United
Television (which had owned a 50% stake in UPN,
until Viacom
bought United's share of the network in 2000) forming the Phoenix
market's second television duopoly.
Although Fox owns both KSAZ and KUTP (now a MyNetworkTV
station), neither aired the Saturday morning children's program block
eventually known as 4Kids
TV, which continued to air on KASW until Fox discontinued its
programming agreement with 4Kids
Entertainment and replaced the block with the Weekend
Marketplace infomercial lineup in December 2008 (which ended up
on KAZT-TV,
channel 7).
On July 27, 2007, as all three aircraft were covering a police
pursuit in downtown
Phoenix, "SkyFox10" pilot/reporter Don Hooper witnessed a
mid-air collision between two news helicopters respectively
belonging to KTVK and KNXV-TV over Steele
Indian School Park in downtown Phoenix.[12]
In
a video of the accident shot from "SkyFox" on YouTube,
Hooper became very shaken and upset as he reported on the collision of
the KTVK and KNXV helicopters. The video also contains audio of Hooper
calling the tower at nearby Sky
Harbor International Airport to report the collision on his
aircraft's FAA
radio. Hooper then talked on a discreet frequency to another news
helicopter belonging to KPNX
(channel 12) informing that he was fine, but two other helicopters had
just crashed (Hooper surmised that KTVK pilot Scott Bowerbank, one of
the four people – two pilots and two photographers – that were
killed, was in one of the choppers).
(Note:
we are interested in mainly the pas history... to see and
stay updated check the stations website or currect updates on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSAZ-TV
Ed
Sharpe - Archivist for SMECC)
KSAZ-TV
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
KSAZ-TV, channel 10, is a Fox
owned-and-operated
television
station located in Phoenix,
Arizona, United
States. The station is owned by the Fox
Television Stations subsidiary of 21st
Century Fox, as part of a duopoly
with MyNetworkTV
affiliate KUTP
(channel 45). The two stations share studio facilities located on
the west end of Downtown
Phoenix's Copper
Square district, and its transmitter is located atop South
Mountain on the city's south side. Its signal is relayed across
northern Arizona
through a network of 20 translator
stations.
Digital
television
Digital channel
Analog-to-digital
conversion
KSAZ-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF
channel 10, at 8:30 a.m. on June 12, 2009, the official date in
which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned
from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The
station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF
channel 31 to its former analog VHF channel 10.[14]
