King Broadcasting
In 1947, Bullitt bought a small AM radio station, KEVR. She immediately applied to the Federal Communications Commission to change the station's call letters to KING (for King County, Washington), but KING was already registered to an old merchant ship, the SS Watertown. Undaunted, Bullitt negotiated with the freighter's owner and acquired the letters. (According to legend, Bullitt personally rowed out to the freighter with a bottle of champagne to meet the captain, who didn't care what call letters he used and asked only that Bullitt make a donation to his church.) The following year, Bullitt received a license for an FM station, KING-FM, and used it to broadcast classical music, her favorite.
In 1949, Bullitt purchased an eight-month-old television station, KRSC-TV, and renamed it KING-TV. Initially an affiliate of the then-poor-performing ABC network, KING-TV became an NBC station in 1959 after Bullitt persuaded the more successful network to switch its affiliation from rival station KOMO-TV. KING-TV remains an NBC affiliate today.
Bullitt turned the presidency of King Broadcasting, as the company was called, over to her son Charles Stimson "Stim" Bullitt in 1961, remaining on the board as chairperson for several years thereafter. Dorothy and Stimson both believed strongly that the stations of King Broadcasting should serve the public, and not just be driven by ratings and revenue. At Bullitt's insistence, KING-TV built one of the first local TV news operations in the country, and through the 1950s and 1960s the station's news programming earned a national reputation for quality, on the strength of its locally produced documentaries and tough investigative journalism. Through the influence of the Bullitts and King Broadcasting executive Ancil Payne, KING-TV and its sister stations developed a corporate culture characterized by political liberalism, expressed through broadcast editorials and a dedication to the Bullitts' notion of public service. In 1952, Senator Joseph McCarthy threatened to have KING-TV's license revoked after the station barred the senator from delivering an allegedly libelous attack on the air. In 1966, Stimson Bullitt himself made the only televised appearance of his career when he delivered an impassioned and controversial editorial against the Vietnam War, long before the American public as a whole began to turn against the conflict's prosecution.
Read more about this topic: Dorothy Stimson Bullitt
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