Flagship (broadcasting) - Television

Television

A flagship television station is the principal television station of a television network in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

In the late 1920s, network owned-and-operated stations (or "O&O") for radio in New York began producing live entertainment and news programs, fed by telephone lines to affiliate. These eventually were dubbed flagship stations.

When television networks were formed in the United States in the late 1940s and grew during the early 1950s, television network-owned stations in New York became the production centers for programs originating on the East Coast, feeding affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC in the eastern three-fourths of the country. Stations in Los Angeles similarly started producing programs on the West Coast, feeding affiliates in the Pacific Time Zone, Alaska, and Hawaii. Consequently, the networks' New York stations became known as the "East Coast flagships" of their respective networks and the networks' Los Angeles stations became known as the "West Coast flagships".

However before the 1950s, San Francisco was also considered a West Coast flagship market for the networks, with much of the CBS and NBC network's West Coast news programming originating from that city. This is seen the calls of CBS's KCBS (AM) being based in their original city of San Francisco instead of Los Angeles (the use of KCBS-TV in Los Angeles only dating back to 1984), while KNBR (which was subsequently sold to another party by NBC in 1987) was formerly known as KNBC before the network moved those calls to KRCA-TV in Los Angeles in 1962.

ABC, CBS, and NBC are headquartered in New York, which is the largest television market in the U.S., so their respective New York radio and television stations are considered the overall network flagship stations. As programming schedules increased and modern technology improved transmission to affiliates, the networks set up operations centers in New York (for the East Coast feed) and Los Angeles (for the West Coast feed). Los Angeles is the second largest television market in the U.S., and traditional home to the motion picture industry and its pool of popular talent, one of the reasons the radio networks set up operations there in the 1930s and 1940s.

This arrangement is reversed for the Fox Broadcasting Company. When Fox was launched in 1986, its network operations center was (and still is) based in Los Angeles. However, Fox's parent company, the News Corporation, is headquartered in New York, along with their news division. Fox-owned WNYW in New York is considered the network's overall flagship, while sister station KTTV in Los Angeles is considered a second flagship station.

The term is also used for stations that operate satellite stations in other cities. For example, KSNW in Wichita, Kansas is the flagship station of the Kansas State Network, a chain of NBC affiliates in western Kansas.

It is also used to identify a station in terms of ownership. A flagship can be located in the market where the owner is located, or in the largest market where that owner operates. For example, WSB-TV in Atlanta is the flagship of Cox Enterprises, because Cox's headquarters is located in Atlanta (although Cox owns KTVU in San Francisco/Oakland, which is larger than Atlanta). Gannett lists three flagship stations (WXIA Atlanta, WUSA Washington, and KUSA-TV Denver). Likewise, WFAA is the flagship station for Belo, as its headquarters are located in Dallas.