KIRO-TV: Encyclopedia II - KIRO-TV - History

KIRO-TV - History

Channel 7 was to be the last VHF TV channel allocation in the Puget Sound area, and its license was hotly contested. In the end, it went to Saul Haas, owner of KIRO-AM, and the station signed on as KIRO-TV in 1958. It became a CBS affiliate, and competed heavily against KTNT, another CBS affiliate licensed to Tacoma. KIRO eventually won out, becoming the sole CBS affiliate for the Puget Sound area in the early 1960s.

However, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, KIRO still faced competition in some Western Washington households from Bellingham's KVOS-TV, which at the time was also a CBS affiliate. After years of legal challenges and negotiations with CBS and KIRO, KVOS phased out most CBS programming but retained a nominal CBS affiliation until the early 1990s, during which it would run all of the CBS shows that were preempted by KIRO.

In 1964, KIRO-AM-FM-TV came under the ownership of Bonneville International Corporation, part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

In 1994, CBS found itself without an affiliate in Dallas after KDFW left the network to become a Fox affiliate. As a result, CBS began to negotiate with Gaylord Broadcasting in order to secure an affiliation agreement with the independent station it had long owned there, KTVT. As part of the deal, CBS would also affiliate with Gaylord-owned KSTW (which was previously an independent station, and was about to affiliate with The WB). The deal was announced in the summer of 1994, and CBS programming which hitherto had been pre-empted by KIRO was moved to KSTW by the fall of that year. Other programs such as The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder were shown on KSTW.

More changes descended upon KIRO as it was sold by Bonneville to Belo Corporation, which took ownership of the station in 1995. The station affiliated with UPN on March 13, 1995 and modified its local newscast lineup, with newscasts at:

• 5–9am (previously only went until 7 am, now continued until 9 am with the last two hours as "7 Live" with Joyce Taylor, a locally produced alternative to the national morning shows);
• 5–7pm (which previously were separate 5pm and 6pm newscasts, with the CBS Evening News in between at 5:30pm);
• 10–11pm (which was previously an 11pm newscast);
• along with its existing 12noon–1pm newscast.

The rest of the day on KIRO was filled with first-run syndicated talk shows, reality shows, off-network dramas, a couple of off-network sitcoms, UPN shows, and movies.

Later, Belo Corporation acquired the Providence Journal Company, which owned Seattle's NBC affiliate KING-TV. Belo could not own both KING and KIRO, and as a result, the company opted to put KIRO on the market.

Initially, the Paramount Stations Group announced its intention to buy KIRO and turn it into a more traditional independent station, with a lineup of more cartoons, sitcoms, and movies. However, after further research, Paramount found that the newscasts on KIRO were doing very well. On the other hand, Cox Communications (which took ownership of KSTW in mid-1997) found it rather difficult to upgrade KSTW's news department to the level of competition among the other stations in the market. As a result, the two companies came to a deal. Cox handed KSTW over to Paramount, and in turn received KIRO-TV from Belo. The two stations retained their respective syndicated programming, but swapped network affiliations once again, with KSTW becoming a UPN owned-and-operated station (O&O), and KIRO regaining its CBS affiliation on June 30, 1997.

From 1987 to 1994, under the ownership of Bonneville, KIRO refused to air The Bold and the Beautiful, which normally aired at 12:30pm. The station aired a one-hour local newscast from 12noon to 1pm instead. As a result, the station received many protest letters from fans of the show during that period, and even one from the show's creator himself, William J. Bell. During that time, the show was seen instead on KTZZ (now KTWB) and KVOS.

KIRO now runs the entire CBS lineup (including The Bold and the Beautiful) with no pre-emptions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki