KXTV - History

History

The station went on the air on March 19, 1955 as KBET, owned by locally-based Sacramento Telecasters. McClatchy, owner of the Sacramento Bee newspaper, and Sacramento Telecasters had long fought over the television broadcast station permit before the Federal Communications Commission and ultimately in federal court.

In 1959, the call letters became KXTV (the "X" being the Roman numeral for the VHF channel it broadcasts on, channel 10) when Corinthian Broadcasting bought the station. Corinthian became part of Dun & Bradstreet in 1971. The A.H. Belo Corporation bought all of Dun & Bradstreet's television stations (except for two in Indiana, which went to LIN Broadcasting) in February 1984.

From its founding until 1995, KXTV was an affiliate of CBS. As a CBS affiliate, the station preempted some lower-rated daytime (the 9-10am block in the 1980s and early 1990s) and late night (from the late 1980s until the arrival of the Late Show with David Letterman in 1993) programs. KXTV also preempted Sunday morning cartoons that CBS offered from the 1960s until the early 1980s. In 1991, KXTV dropped The Price Is Right, due to the abundance of syndicated programming commitments. After several months of complaints, KXTV reinstated The Price Is Right, but to make room for syndicated programming it was committed to carry, dropped Guiding Light due to low ratings in the early 1990s. While most CBS stations aired The Young and the Restless from 11 a.m.-noon, KXTV moved it to the 3 p.m. timeslot in 1994 where the soap did well. As a CBS affiliate, KXTV's station ID included an electronic alarm like version of the infamous CBS "ding".