KFOX-TV


KFOX-TV, virtual channel 14, is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to El Paso, Texas, United States and also serving Las Cruces, New Mexico. The station is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, as part of a duopoly with CBS affiliate KDBC-TV. The two stations share studios on South Alto Mesa Drive in northwest El Paso; KFOX-TV's transmitter is located atop the Franklin Mountains on the El Paso city limits.

History

Launch and independent era

The station first signed on the air in August 1979 as KCIK-TV. It originally operated as a nonprofit Christian-oriented religious independent station, and was the first UHF television station to sign on in the El Paso market. It was also the first new commercial station to sign on in El Paso since KVIA-TV hit the airwaves 23 years earlier. Although El Paso itself had over 400,000 people at the time channel 14 signed on, the El Paso market has always been a small to medium-sized market because the surrounding urban and rural areas, then as now, are not much larger than the city itself.
The station was founded by International Christian Television, owned by the late Pete E. Meryl Warren III, who subsequently started KJLF-TV in June 1991. Warren and Alex Blomerth had been involved in a church outreach using a leased access channel on cable channel 8. The two partnered to sign on channel 14, broadcasting from the transmitter facilities and studios that were used by the cable channel.
The station signed on from an existing tower on a peak of the Franklin Mountains, located north of Comanche Peak and Ranger Peak that had been built in the early 1970s for a planned expansion of KELP-TV but had never been used. The site was located at the highest elevation in Texas at above sea level; a tramway had to be installed as there was no access to the transmitter by roadway. KELP-TV and the yet-unlaunched KCOS, as were some FM radio stations, were to use the new site. While no television stations used the site until KCIK signed on, the local two-way radio operation began to use the site for radio repeaters. KCIK-TV moved to the site in 1979 using a transmitter than had been used by a television station on channel 30 in Puerto Rico. The station initially broadcast its signal using a low-power transmitter, before it was upgraded to full-power later that year.
Warren and Blomerth sold the station to the Cristo Rey Corporation in 1982. The new owners converted channel 14 into El Paso's first general entertainment commercial independent station, while still carrying some religious programming.

Fox affiliation

On October 6, 1986, the station became a charter affiliate of Fox, though it effectively remained a de facto independent station until Fox began to program all seven nights in 1993.
In 1988, KCIK was purchased by New York entrepreneur Jack Mulderrig Sr., who invested in the construction of a new studio facility at 6004 North Mesa Street in the northwestern part of the city which opened in June 1994. On January 3, six months before the opening of the new studios, the station changed its call letters to KFOX-TV, to reflect its network affiliation and mark it as one of Fox's 10 strongest affiliates. The use of the KFOX-TV callsign differs from other stations that incorporate the network name into their call letters—ABC, NBC and CBS each have owned-and-operated stations in New York City and Los Angeles that bear their associated network within their calls; however, the KFOX calls were not used by Fox for its O&O in Los Angeles.
In August 1996, Cox Broadcasting acquired KFOX-TV, and turned it into a major player in the El Paso television market by upgrading its syndicated programming inventory and developing a news department. On July 20, 2012, one day after Cox purchased four television stations in Jacksonville and Tulsa, Oklahoma, from Newport Television, Cox put KFOX-TV and sister stations in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Steubenville, Ohio, and Reno, Nevada, along with several of its radio stations in medium to small markets, up for sale.

Purchase by Sinclair and merger into KDBC's operations

On February 25, 2013, Cox announced that it would sell the four television stations to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The sale was approved by the FCC on April 29, and it was finalized on May 2. That April, Titan TV Broadcast Group filed to sell CBS affiliate KDBC-TV to one of Sinclair's partner companies, Cunningham Broadcasting. However, nearly all of Cunningham Broadcasting's stock is controlled by trusts in the names of family members of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith, which would result in Sinclair effectively running a virtual duopoly in the El Paso market that circumvented FCC ownership rules. FCC duopoly regulations normally disallow two of the four highest-rated stations from being directly owned by a single entity. However, Sinclair cited that KDBC is ranked fourth overall in the El Paso market, while KFOX placed sixth in total-day viewership. In addition, FCC regulations require a market to be left with eight unique owners after a duopoly is formed, and Sinclair noted in its application that the El Paso–Las Cruces market would still have eight unique owners after Sinclair completed its acquisition of KDBC. The FCC approved the sale of KDBC directly to Sinclair on September 23, and the transaction was formally completed on October 1, creating a duopoly with KDBC-TV. Sinclair later announced plans to purchase a new studio facility to house the two stations; both KDBC and KFOX will remain at their exiting separate facilities until construction on the new facility is completed.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
14.1720pFOXMain KFOX-TV programming / Fox
14.2480iCometComet TV
14.3480iCharge!Charge!
14.4480iStadiumStadium

The station was originally scheduled to begin carrying the Retro Television Network on a new second digital subchannel in late 2008; the launch was delayed for unknown reasons, with KFOX not launching the RTN subchannel until January 15, 2009.

Analog-to-digital conversion

In the early 2000s, KFOX-TV became the first station in the El Paso market to transmit a digital television signal. On May 21, 2009, the station performed two-minute tests of its digital signal, temporarily shutting down its analog feed at 6:25 a.m., 12:25 and 6:25 p.m. that day to prepare viewers for the pending digital television transition the following month by make sure they had necessary equipment to be able to continue receiving the station post-transition.
KFOX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 14, at midnight 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 remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 15. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 14.
As part of the SAFER Act, KFOX kept its analog signal on the air until July 12 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.

Programming

programs broadcast by KFOX-TV include Family Feud, The People's Court, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family among others. KFOX-TV clears the entire Fox network schedule; atypical for a "Big Four" affiliate, the station carries children's programming that meets FCC educational programming guidelines on weekdays at 12:30 p.m.. In addition, unlike most Fox affiliates, its weekday daytime schedule relies largely on syndicated sitcoms with only a limited number of talk and court shows, as opposed to the daytime lineups of most Fox stations that are dominated by programs from the latter two genres.

News operation

KFOX-TV presently broadcasts 26½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week. The station is unusual among Fox stations as it has no sports department; Fox owned-and-operated station WOFL in Orlando, Florida, Meredith Corporation-owned WHNS in Greenville, South Carolina and E. W. Scripps Company-owned WFTX-TV in Cape Coral, Florida, are the only other Fox stations in the country whose news operation does not include a sports department. The station maintains a news bureau located on East Idaho Avenue in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Under Cox Broadcasting ownership, the station invested in the launch of a news department. In September 1997, KFOX launched the first prime time newscast in the El Paso market, with the debut of a half-hour 9:00 p.m. newscast. The program grew in popularity to become the most-watched local newscast in the market within four years of its premiere. Since then, KFOX's news department has received nearly 300 local, regional and national awards for journalistic excellence including Emmy Awards, Edward R. Murrow Awards and Katie Awards. Even after the weeknight broadcast expanded to one hour by 2000, atypical for most Fox stations that produce their newscasts in-house, the Saturday edition of KFOX's 9:00 p.m. newscast remained a half-hour in length; it is one of a handful of news-producing Fox affiliates to air its prime time newscast in such a fashion.
In January 2004, the station expanded its news programming with the debut of a three-hour morning newscast, the KFOX Morning News, running from 5:00 to 8:00 a.m. Additionally, on October 8, 2008, KFOX launched a half-hour 6:00 p.m. newscast; the program won two Regional Emmy Awards for "Best Newscast". The program was moved to 5:00 p.m. and expanded to one hour on January 2, 2012.