History
Central Iowa's second television station, KGTV, signed-on in 1953 airing an analog signal on UHF channel 17. At the time, all four networks were shoehorned on WOI-TV. KGTV was plagued by financial problems from the start. The Des Moines market is fairly large geographically, and at the time UHF signals didn't travel very far across long distances. It didn't help that very few television sets had UHF capability at the time. As a result, while KGTV should have logically taken the NBC affiliation, that network opted to keep its secondary affiliation with WOI-TV.
The death knell for the station sounded a few months after it went on the air, when Palmer Communications, owner of WHO-AM-FM, won a construction permit for WHO-TV (channel 13). As WHO had been an NBC radio affiliate for almost 30 years, it was a foregone conclusion that WHO-TV would take the NBC affiliation. Channel 17 went dark later in 1953. The KGTV calls now reside on the ABC affiliate in San Diego, California.
Analog UHF channel 17 remained silent until March 17, 1983 when Independent KCBR (known as "The Great Entertainer") signed-on. It was Iowa's first independent station, as well as the first new commercial station in Central Iowa since KRNT-TV (now KCCI) signed-on 28 years earlier. The call letters were picked from the first names of the three original owners: Carl Goldsberry, Bill Trout, and Ray Gazzo. Goldsberry was a Northwestern Bell yellow pages sales representative, while Trout and Gazzo were partners in the Des Moines law firm of Coppola Trout Taha & Gazzo. Trout and Gazzo's law partner, Joe Coppola, bought a stake in the station when it needed a cash infusion.
The station was sold to Richard L. Duchossois, a Chicago businessman, in 1986. Duchossois changed the station's call letters to KDSM-TV ("KDSM" is the IATA airport code for Des Moines International Airport) on January 17 and later that year, it became one of the charter affiliates of Fox. It came under the ownership of River City Broadcasting in 1991. In 1996, River City merged with the station's current owner, Sinclair. On May 15, 2012, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox agreed to a five-year extension to the network's affiliation agreement with Sinclair's 19 Fox stations, including KDSM-TV, allowing them to continue to carry the network's programming through 2017.
Read more about this topic: KDSM-TV
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