KOTV-TV

KOTV-DT (channel 6) is a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Griffin Media alongside Muskogee-licensed CW affiliate KQCW-DT (channel 19) and radio stations KTSB (1170 AM), KBEZ (92.9 FM), KVOO-FM (98.5), KXBL (99.5 FM) and KHTT (106.9 FM). All of the outlets share studios at the Griffin Media Center on North Boston Avenue and East Cameron Street in the downtown neighborhood's Tulsa Arts District; KOTV's transmitter is located on South 273rd East Avenue (just north of the Muskogee Turnpike) in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

History

Early history

On March 24, 1948, the Cameron Television Corporation (originally doing business as George E. Cameron Inc.) submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build and license to operate a broadcast television station in Tulsa that would transmit on VHF channel 6. The company was owned by George E. Cameron Jr., a Texas-born independent oil producer, broadcasting executive Maria Helen Alvarez and John B. Hill, a salesman for a Tulsa oil field supplier (both Hill, who would serve as KOTV's original sales manager, and Alvarez owned 15% stakes in the company).

The formation of the partnership traces to when Alvarez – at the time, an employee of the Tulsa Broadcasting Company, then owner of local radio station KTUL (1430 AM, now KTBZ) – conducted a study authorized by John Toole "J. T." Griffin, majority owner and president of Tulsa Broadcasting and Muskogee-based wholesale food distributor Griffin Grocery Company, and his sister, Marjory Griffin Leake, into whether a television venture in Tulsa could be successful. After two years of research, Alvarez suggested to the Griffins that they file a television license application as quickly as possible. The Griffin siblings ultimately decided that such a venture would be too risky at that point and planned to wait a year before going to the FCC to apply, only to have those plans stalled by an agency-imposed freeze on television station license applications instituted by the FCC in September 1948. (The Griffins and James C. "Jimmy" Leake, husband of Marjory and brother-in-law of J. T., would eventually venture into television when their Oklahoma Television Corporation signed on CBS affiliate KWTV in Oklahoma City in December 1953; J. T. Griffin would launch his second television property in September 1954, when Tulsa Broadcasting signed on Muskogee-based ABC affiliate KTVX hannel 8, now KTUL, which would relocate to Tulsa in September 1957">KTUL.html" ;"title="hannel 8, now KTUL">hannel 8, now KTUL, which would relocate to Tulsa in September 1957) Alvarez subsequently resigned from Tulsa Broadcasting and began casting about for investors who would be willing to get a station on the air right away. At a social event, she was introduced to Cameron, who was looking to spend monthly royalty checks he had saved, totaling $50,000, on a business venture.

The FCC granted the construction permit for channel 6 to the Cameron-Alvarez-Hill group on June 2, 1948, as no other applications had been submitted for agency review. However, the group soon discovered that they would need to re-file the request, as a previously unnoticed typographical error">typo in the application had assigned KOVB as the call letters for the new station, rather than the calls that Cameron had requested, KOTV (for "Oklahoma Television"). The FCC would approve the change to the KOTV calls in March 1949. While this was happening, Alvarez negotiated a leasing agreement to utilize an International Harvester dealership and repair shop at West Third Street and South Frankfort Avenue in downtown Tulsa to serve as KOTV's studio building, and converted it into what became the largest television studio facility in the United States at the time (a second floor was added to the existing facility in the fall of 1954). The station's transmitter antenna and dish, which was built in the backyard of chief engineer George Jacobs, was eventually hoisted to the top of the National Bank of Tulsa Building on East 3rd Street and South Boston Avenue. Alvarez had spent a year convincing National Bank of Tulsa officers that the tower would be safe and, in time, become a local landmark. While the tower was being installed, a workman's wrench fell from atop the building, fatally striking the head of a woman who was passing below the construction site. Detractors of the station – who took to calling the accident, "Cameron's Folly" – jumped on the story, proclaiming it as a sign that KOTV was "jinxed" from the start. A local radio executive who spoke at a Tulsa Chamber of Commerce luncheon said that anyone investing in KOTV or buying a television set was "foolish"; Cameron Television continued on, however, with Alvarez (who served as president of Cameron Television and general manager of KOTV) handling all aspects of the station's development, while Cameron himself primarily focused on supervising his many oil properties in California. Alvarez and her company co-partners invested nearly $500,000 into developing the station; in an interview with the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' shortly before the station signed on, she made the bold statement that KOTV would be operating in the "black" within six months of its sign-on, a comment dismissed by many of its detractors. Alvarez also visited 42 of the 89 existing television stations already in operation throughout the United States to study the intricacies of running a television station.

KOTV first began test transmissions on October 15, 1949; the pattern signal was seen by a handful of viewers among the 3,500 northeastern Oklahoma residents that owned television receivers, carrying as far away as Enid and Eufaula, Oklahoma, Monett, Missouri and Fayetteville, Arkansas. The station started regular broadcasts on October 22. It was the first television station to sign on in the Tulsa market, the second to sign on in the state of Oklahoma (after WKY-TV ow KFOR-TV">KFOR-TV.html" ;"title="ow KFOR-TV">ow KFOR-TVin Oklahoma City, which debuted five months earlier on June 6) and the 90th to sign on in the United States. More than one month later, on November 23, KOTV broadcast its first locally produced program: a live meeting by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce at the Tulsa Club (on East 5th Street and South Cincinnati Avenue), which was attended by many of the station's original critics. One week later, on November 30, the station commenced regular broadcasts at 7:00 p.m. with a "Special Dedication Program" that featured guests such as Oklahoma governor Roy J. Turner">Governor of Oklahoma">Oklahoma governor Roy J. Turner; Tulsa mayor Roy Lundy; singer Patti Page">Roy_J._Turner.html" ;"title="Governor of Oklahoma">Oklahoma governor Roy J. Turner">Governor of Oklahoma">Oklahoma governor Roy J. Turner; Tulsa mayor Roy Lundy; singer Patti Page; Leon McAuliffe and his western swing band; and Miss Oklahoma Louise O'Brien. The next day on December 1, KOTV broadcast a two-hour sampling of the top programs from all five networks of the time from which the station carried programming during its first few years. Over 3,000 television sets were placed throughout the city for public viewing, some of them set on sidewalks outside of appliance stores. After several days of this sampling, the public began to buy their own television sets and KOTV began to cement a small, but growing, viewing audience in the Four State Area.

Originally broadcasting for 11½ hours per day from 12:30 p.m. to midnight seven days a week, the station has been a primary CBS television affiliate since it signed on. Channel 6 initially also maintained secondary affiliations with NBC, the DuMont Television Network and the Paramount Television Network at its launch; KOTV would add a fifth affiliation on November 15, when it began carrying a limited selection of ABC network programs. Along with network shows, in its early years, one-third of the station's schedule was devoted to locally produced programs. Even though KOTV's relations with all of the commercial broadcast networks were smooth, the station showed a preference for CBS's program offerings over the others. At first, network programming was aired about one week after their initial live broadcast on the East Coast; it would not be until 1952, before the installation of a microwave link with New York City made reception of live network programming possible. Three hours of programming were filled by varied network content during the evening hours.

On May 12, 1952, Cameron and Hill sold a controlling 85% interest in KOTV to another Texas oil magnate, Jack D. Wrather Jr., and his mother, Maizie Wrather, for $2.5 million (a purchase price far exceeding the amount it cost to build the station). Wrather knew little about television, and persuaded Alvarez – who retained 15% of the station's shares – to stay on as general manager (a role she had held since KOTV signed on, and a groundbreaking one in broadcasting, as she became the first female to work as a general manager of a television station). Wrather also made her a full partner in a new joint venture entity that became known as Wrather-Alvarez Inc. (later renamed the General Television Corporation in January 1954). The sale received FCC approval on July 31. By 1954, the station expanded its daily schedule to 17 hours per day from 7:00 a.m. to midnight.

Because of the aforementioned freeze on license application grants, KOTV was the only television station in the Tulsa market until 1954. That March, KOTV gained its first competitor when UHF station KCEB (channel 23, channel now occupied by Fox affiliate KOKI-TV) signed on as a primary NBC and secondary DuMont affiliate. However, as manufacturers were not required to include UHF tuners on television sets at the time, NBC struck a backdoor agreement with KOTV that allowed channel 6 to continue "cherry-picking" stronger shows from that network. In April 1954, KOTV installed color transmission equipment, in a byproduct of an agreement with NBC to carry network programs produced in the format; the station would air its first network color broadcast, the children's program ''Ding Dong School'', one month later on May 21. A few months later on December 5, KVOO-TV (channel 2, now KJRH-TV) signed on and took the remaining NBC programs that KOTV carried. In preparation of losing NBC programming, KCEB had switched to a primary ABC affiliation in July of that year, with that network agreeing to affiliate with channel 23 on the condition that KOTV be allowed to cherry-pick its shows as well. KTVX took all of the remaining ABC programs when that station debuted on September 18, 1954, which left KOTV with an exclusive CBS affiliation and KCEB (which, like many early UHF television stations, would cease operations in December of that year as a result of losing its affiliations with NBC and ABC) saddled with fourth-ranked DuMont. Also in 1954, KOTV constructed a transmitter tower at the Osage–Tulsa county line (north of Sand Springs) near Big Heart Mountain, a hill which was named by station president C. Wade Petersmeyer. KOTV management subsequently reached an agreement with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) to lease space on the tower – which became the fifth tallest structure in the world at the time of its completion that October – for the transmitter of proposed educational station KOED (channel 11), which would eventually sign on January 12, 1959. The new transmission facility also came with an increase in its transmitter power from 16.5 kW to 100 kW, expanding KOTV's signal coverage to a area. In 1956, KOTV began carrying select programs from the NTA Film Network.

Corinthian Broadcasting and Belo ownership

In April 1954, General Television sold KOTV to Indianapolis-based venture capital firm J.H. Whitney & Company for $4 million. The transaction involved a two-phase transfer in which KOTV was reassigned from General Television directly to Alvarez, Wrather and the latter's mother, Maizie Wrather, all of whom would then transfer their interests to Whitney-owned licensee Osage Broadcasting Corp. The transfer received FCC approval on May 14, with KOTV becoming Whitney's first broadcasting property. Whitney (whose namesake owner, philanthropist and investor John Hay "Jock" Whitney, was the brother-in-law of CBS chairman William S. Paley) folded the group – which had expanded to include fellow CBS affiliates KGUL-TV (now Houston-based KHOU) in Galveston, Texas, WISH-TV (now a CW affiliate) and WISH-AM (now WTLC) in Indianapolis, and WANE-TV and WANE radio (now WIOE) in Fort Wayne, Indiana – into a new subsidiary, the Corinthian Broadcasting Corporation, on April 26, 1957.

In 1958, KOTV became the first television station in Oklahoma to install videotape equipment for the production and broadcast of programming. The following year, in 1959, KOTV upgraded its equipment to broadcast local film shows in color; the later began broadcasting its local programming in color in December 1966. On December 3, 1969, Corinthian Broadcasting – which had its ownership transferred directly to J.H. Whitney from his company's Whitney Communications Corporation unit two years earlier – announced it had reached an agreement to be acquired by private equity firm Dun & Bradstreet for $137 million in stock. Following a 16-month-long regulatory review process that included a deadlocked 3-3 tie vote when the agency first considered the sale's approval in November 1970, the purchase received FCC approval on April 14, 1971, and was finalized the following month on May 27. In 1974, KOTV maintained an affiliation with the TVS Television Network, carrying the network's World Football League game telecasts in place of CBS's Thursday night lineup.

On June 19, 1983, the Dallas, Texas-based A. H. Belo Corporation acquired the six Corinthian Television properties (with WISH-TV and WANE-TV subsequently being spun off to LIN Broadcasting) from Dun and Bradstreet for $606 million; KOTV's purchase price was $41 million. The sale – which was considered to be the largest group purchase by a single broadcasting company up to that time, surpassing the price of the Gannett Company

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