KDFW (channel 4) is a television station licensed to Dallas, Texas, United States, serving the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It is owned and operated by the Fox network through its Fox Television Stations division alongside KDFI (channel 27), an independent station with MyNetworkTV. The two stations share studios on North Griffin Street in downtown Dallas; KDFW's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.
History As a CBS affiliate Times-Herald ownership On August 20, 1945, the KRLD Radio Corp.—a subsidiary of the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald newspaper, which was headed at the time by Times Herald Printing Co. president Tom C. Gooch—filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license and construction permit to operate a commercial television station on VHF channel 2. On August 22, 1946, one year and two days after it filed for the broadcast license, KRLD Radio Corp. amended its application to instead seek assignment on VHF channel 4. (The VHF channel 2 allocation was later reassigned to Denton as part of the FCC's "Sixth Report and Order" in November 1951; it would eventually be assigned to North Texas Public Broadcasting, which signed on KDTN—now a Daystar owned-and-operated station—over that allocation on September 1, 1988.) The FCC Broadcast Bureau granted the license to the Times Herald on September 13, 1946.
The newspaper chose to assign KRLD-TV for use as the television station's call letters; the base KRLD callsign had been used by the Times Herald-owned radio station on 1080 AM—a combined reference to both Edwin J. Kiest, an original investor and one-time owner of the Times Herald, and KRLD (AM), and the radio station's founding owner, Radio Laboratories of Dallas (which changed its name from Dallas Radio Laboratories as it sought the radio permit upon discovering that the KDRL calls had already been assigned for maritime use)—since it signed on its original 1040 AM frequency in October 1926, and applied to its FM sister on 92.5 (now KZPS) upon its March 1948 sign-on.
The station began test broadcasts on November 21, 1949. Channel 4 officially signed on the air, as KRLD-TV, two weeks later on December 3, 1949, at 12:30 p.m., with a short inaugural program featuring speeches from Gooch and KRLD-AM-TV managing director Clyde Rembert dedicating the station's launch, followed by a broadcast of the CBS game show It Pays to Be Ignorant. The first local program aired on the station that day was a college football game in which the Notre Dame Fighting Irish defeated the Southern Methodist Mustangs, 27–20. (The station was originally scheduled to debut on October 1, later pushed back to November 15.) KRLD-TV was the third television station to sign on in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, following Dallas-based KBTV (channel 8, now WFAA) and Fort Worth-licensed WBAP-TV (channel 5, now KXAS-TV), all signing on within a 15-month timeframe. It was also the fourth Texas-based television station to be granted a license by the FCC (along with WBAP-TV, KBTV and Houston's KLEE-TV [now KPRC-TV]).
Channel 4 originally carried programming from CBS, an affiliation that KRLD-TV inherited through the CBS Radio Network's longtime relationship with KRLD (AM), which became the first radio station in Texas to affiliate with the television network's radio predecessor in 1927 (when the station was transmitting at 1040 AM); it was the first Metroplex-area television station to have maintained a singular network affiliation from its sign-on. The station originally broadcast for 4½ hours each weekday (from 7:30 a.m. to noon) and for four hours per day (from noon to 5 p.m.) on Saturdays and Saturdays. Among the local programs on channel 4 in its early years included O.Kay! Mr. Munn (hosted by an artist drawing visual interpretations of various song lyrics, predating the advent of the music video) and Confessions (a series featuring interviews with incarcerated criminals from the Dallas County Jail revealing why they committed the crimes they were convicted of).
The station initially operated from studio facilities located inside the Adolphus Hotel (between Commerce and Main Streets, north of the Times Herald Building) in downtown Dallas. The building—which also housed KRLD radio's facilities at the time—was used on a temporary basis until a permanent broadcast facility then under construction within the Times Heralds Herald Square building (at 1101 Patterson Street, which has since been demolished and converted into a parking lot) was completed. The tower that transmitted its signal (supporting microwave and remote antennas) was also based on the studio grounds. The station's transmission tower was located on Griffin Street and San Jacinto Avenue; at the time it was incorrectly designated as the tallest free-standing television transmission tower in the world. While it was among the tallest, taller TV towers had already been erected in Columbus, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and St. Paul, Minnesota. Nonetheless, the tower provided a signal that spanned approximately from the site. By 1954, KRLD-TV expanded its broadcast day to an 18-hour daily schedule (running from 6 a.m. to midnight). In May 1955, the station began construction of a new -tall tower in Cedar Hill. At the time of its completion in October 1955, the structure was considered to be the tallest television broadcast tower in the world (once KRLD-TV moved its transmitter to the Cedar Hill tower in early 1956, the original Griffin Street transmitter remained in use as an auxiliary facility until it was disassembled in 1984; the antenna on which it was installed was torn down in 1995, to reduce the load on the tower).
KRLD-TV served as the home base for CBS' network coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when suspect Lee Harvey Oswald (from an upper-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository) shot his rifle at sniper range at the Presidential motorcade carrying Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally as it had turned onto Elm Street. Eddie Barker, who was KRLD-TV's news director at the time and had been with the station since it signed on fourteen years earlier as one of the original members of its news department staff, was the first person to announce Kennedy's death on television, relaying a message from an official at Parkland Hospital that Kennedy had succumbed from the gunshot wound as doctors conducted emergency surgery. Because of a local press pool arrangement that was put in place that morning to cover Kennedy's speech at the Trade Mart downtown, Barker's scoop appeared live simultaneously on CBS, which had sent correspondent Dan Rather to report from Dealey Plaza, and ABC. Two days later, a KRLD-TV field crew captured footage of Oswald's assassination by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as officers were transferring the former in handcuffs out of the Dallas Police Department's downtown precinct.
CBS also maintained an arrangement with Channel 4 to use the station's remote unit to transmit live programming broadcast by the network during the 1960s and 1970s; in particular, the remote transmission truck was used to relay color broadcasts of CBS' NFL and college football game telecasts held in Texas. In 1964, KRLD-TV moved its operations from the Times Heralds Patterson Street offices into the station's current, purpose-built studio facility at 400 North Griffin Street (across the street from the former building, at the intersection of Griffin and San Jacinto). In 1968, the station's Cedar Hill transmitter site was struck by a helicopter, causing substantial damage to the tower.
Times Mirror and Argyle ownership On September 22, 1969, the Los Angeles–based Times Mirror Company announced it would purchase the Times Herald and the KRLD radio and television from the Times Herald Printing Co. for $91 million in cash and stock. Although recently implemented FCC cross-ownership rules prohibited media companies from owning newspapers and full-power broadcast television and radio outlets in the same market, Times Mirror received approval to maintain the existing combination of the Times Herald and KRLD-TV under a cross-ownership waiver. However, to comply with FCC rules of the time that prohibited a single company from owning full-power broadcast television and radio outlets in the same market, Times Mirror sold KRLD-AM-FM to KRLD Corp. (owned principally by Philip R. Jonsson, Kenneth A. Jonsson and George V. Charlton, the sons and daughter of Dallas mayor and former Texas Instruments chairman J. Erik Jonsson) for $6.75 million. The transaction was approved by the FCC on May 15, 1970, and was finalized 1½ months later on July 1. The purchase marked Times Mirror's re-entry into broadcasting (it owned KTTV in Los Angeles, a present-day sister station of KDFW, from its sign-on in 1949 until 1963, when it sold that station to Metromedia for $10.5 million in cash and promissory notes), resulting in the creation of Times Mirror Broadcasting.
To comply with an FCC rule in effect at the time that prohibited separately owned radio and television stations in the same market from sharing the same base call letters, as KRLD Corp. was allowed to keep the KRLD call letters for its new radio properties, the station's call letters were changed to KDFW-TV—in partial reference to its service area of Dallas and Fort Worth—on July 2. (The "-TV" suffix was dropped from the KDFW callsign in July 1998; the KRLD-TV calls were later used by present-day CW affiliate KDAF [channel 33] from 1984 to 1986, when Metromedia co-owned that station and KRLD radio, the latter of which was also co-owned with present-day CBS owned-and-operated station KTVT [channel 11] from 1999 until CBS Corporation sold its radio division to Entercom in 2017.) In June 1986, the Times Mirror Company sold the Times Herald to Woodbury, New Jersey–based MediaNews Group for $110 million in cash and notes; Times Mirror retained ownership of KDFW, leaving the station as its sole remaining media property in the Metroplex. (The newspaper would cease publication five years later in December 1991, after it was purchased by the A.H. Belo Corporation, owners of rival newspaper The Dallas Morning News, for $55 million.)
A helicopter-tower collision similar to the one that occurred 19 years earlier happened on January 14, 1987, when KDFW's Cedar Hill broadcast tower (which was jointly owned by KDFW and WFAA, via the Hill Tower, Inc. consortium involving their respective corporate parents) was hit by a Navy F-4 Phantom that was performing training exercises as it was on approach to the Dallas Naval Air Station, clipping several guy-wires. The jet's two occupants survived as they had ejected themselves from the aircraft and parachuted to the ground before it crashed. (KDFW, KXAS and WFAA did not have their transmissions affected by the accident, although radio stations KZEW [97.9 FM, now KBFB] and KSCS [96.3 FM] were knocked off the air and temporarily broadcast at reduced power from another tower as a result.) In 1989, KDFW relocated its transmitter onto a new -tall tower constructed at the junction of Belt Line and Mansfield Roads in Cedar Hill, to the southwest. (The former tower—which had its height reduced to due to the removal of the candelabra mast that encompassed the upper of the structure—was converted into an auxiliary transmitter facility for KDFW, WFAA and radio stations KJMZ [100.3 FM, now KJKK], KMEZ [107.5 FM, now KMVK], KQZY [105.3 FM, now KRLD-FM], KKDA-FM [104.5] and KMGC [102.9 FM, now KDMX].)