History
The station first signed on the air on April 23, 1953 as KTYL-TV, owned by the Harkins Theatre Group and was a sister station to KTYL radio (1490 AM, later on 1310 and now KIHP, and FM 104.7, now KZZP). The station's original studios were located in Mesa, the Phoenix area suburb that serves as the station's city of license. Its appearance brought a full-time NBC affiliate to the Phoenix metropolitan area; ABC and the DuMont Television Network shared time on KPHO-TV, as did NBC prior to 1953. Channel 12 carried some DuMont programming prior to that network's demise in 1956.
John J. Louis, owner of KTAR radio (AM 620 and FM 98.7, now KPKX), bought channel 12 in 1955 and changed its calls to KVAR. The station then changed callsigns again four years later to become KTAR-TV. Its operations were moved into a facility on Central Avenue in Phoenix in 1959, after the Federal Communications Commission began permitting television stations to operate their studio facilities outside of their city of license. Over the years, the Louis family bought several other broadcasting outlets, including WQXI-TV/Atlanta, Georgia and WPTA-TV/Fort Wayne, Indiana. Eventually, the Louis family's broadcasting interests became known as Pacific & Southern Broadcasting, which were headquartered in Phoenix with KTAR-AM-FM-TV as the company's flagship stations.
Advertising mogul Karl Eller bought Pacific & Southern Broadcasting in 1968 and combined it with his existing business to form Combined Communications. Eller was also one of the original founding owners of the city's first major professional sports team, the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association. Channel 12 carried Suns games for years from the team's 1968 inception until the 1980s, when the team's game telecasts moved to then-independent station KNXV-TV (channel 15).
KTAR-TV was the Phoenix pioneer of the so-called "happy talk" news format when it reformatted its newscasts under the Action News format in late 1973, with longtime anchor Ray Thompson paired alongside Bob Hughes, weatherman Dewey Hopper (lately with Air America Radio affiliate KPHX, and a long-time weather forecaster in Sacramento) and sportscaster Ted Brown.
Combined Communications merged with Gannett in 1979, in what was at that time the largest media merger in United States history. Combined's ownership of the KTAR stations had been grandfathered earlier in the decade, when the FCC forbade common ownership of television and radio stations in the same market. However with the Gannett merger, the KTAR cluster lost its grandfathered protection. Gannett opted to keep channel 12 and sell off the radio stations. KTAR-TV then changed its callsign to the present-day KPNX, since the radio side had held the call letters first.
The station had placed third in the Nielsen ratings for many years behind ABC affiliate KTVK and CBS affiliate KTSP. That soon changed in the fall of 1994, when four of the major English-language commercial stations in Phoenix all changed their network affiliations. Coupled with a resurgent NBC, KPNX surged past KTVK to the top of the ratings, where it has stayed ever since, only wavering as NBC has experienced its own network troubles since the 2004-05 television season. As it retained its NBC affiliation as KPHO, KTVK, KSAZ-TV and KNXV all swapped affiliations, KPNX is the only major English-language commercial television station in Phoenix to have never changed its primary network affiliation.
In 2000, Gannett merged with Central Newspapers, owner of The Arizona Republic. As the FCC forbids the common ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market, Gannett would have been forced to sell off either KPNX or the Republic, however the FCC granted Gannett a "permanent" waiver to keep both media properties. In January 2011, KPNX relocated from its studio facility on Central Avenue, where the station had been broadcasting from since 1959, and consolidated its operations with co-owned newspaper The Arizona Republic at the Republic Media Building on East Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix, with the station's local newscasts broadcasting from a streetside studio.
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