KOVR

KOVR (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Stockton, California, United States, serving as the CBS outlet for the Sacramento area. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside KMAX-TV (channel 31), an independent station. The two stations share studios on KOVR Drive in West Sacramento; KOVR's transmitter is located in Walnut Grove, California.

After an application process stretching back to 1948, KOVR began broadcasting in September 1954 from studios in Stockton and a transmitter atop Mount Diablo. This facility provided wide coverage from San Francisco to Sacramento and beyond, but KOVR could not obtain a network affiliation in the San Francisco market, and it had to pay higher programming costs as a San Francisco station. To remedy these issues, the station moved transmitter sites in 1957, becoming fully a Stockton- and Sacramento-area station, and obtained an affiliation with ABC. It partly merged with Sacramento's original ABC affiliate, KCCC-TV, a struggling UHF station.

After moving, the station was sold twice before being acquired by newspaper publisher McClatchy in 1963. This made KOVR a sister to the KFBK radio stations in Sacramento as well as The Sacramento Bee newspaper; it marked McClatchy's entry into local television after an unsuccessful attempt to win channel 10 in the 1950s. McClatchy sold the station in 1980 under intense government pressure on owners of newspaper-broadcast combinations, and it changed hands another six times from 1983 to 1996. The station became a CBS affiliate in 1995 as the result of an affiliation switch and was purchased by CBS in 2005; uniquely, it broadcasts prime time programming one hour ahead of other West Coast stations. Traditionally a third-rated station in local news, ratings have gradually improved for its newscasts since the 1990s.

On March 5, 1948, Radio Diablo, Inc. (later Television Diablo) filed an application for a new television station to broadcast on channel 13, first assigned to San Francisco and then to San Jose, from Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County. From Mount Diablo, the principals in Radio Diablo operated FM station KSBR, which had an effective radiated power of 250,000 watts and, having just moved to the mountaintop, claimed it was heard from the Oregon state line to Bakersfield. Two other groups applied for the channel by late 1948, but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a freeze on new television station grants that October.

When the freeze ended in 1952, channel 13 had been removed from San Jose to Stockton, where it could still cover the city of license from Mount Diablo. Stockton radio station KXOB filed a competing application for channel 13. Radio Diablo, headed by O. H. Brown, estimated it could serve 3.5 million people in San Francisco, Stockton, and Sacramento from its mountaintop site. The owners of KXOB ultimately received shares in Radio Diablo in exchange for the dismissal of KXOB's competing application in a settlement agreement. Broadcaster and furniture store owner Edward Peffer entered into a similar agreement, paving the way for the FCC to grant Radio Diablo the construction permit on February 11, 1954. Leslie Hoffman, who had become the new president of the company, was to have the station named for him as KHOF, but when Hoffman thought of the possibility of "cough" puns based on the designation, the call sign was changed to KOVR, for "coverage".

KOVR began broadcasting September 6, 1954; after an opening night telecast produced in the Stockton studios, it aired live coverage from the California State Fair. It had studios in Stockton on Miner Avenue, as well as a converted bus that served as a remote broadcast van along with two other mobile units. KOVR was the second television station in Stockton; an ultra high frequency (UHF) outlet, KTVU (channel 36), had gone on the air the previous December.

As an independent station without network affiliation (but with a secondary link with DuMont, primarily for NFL games and Life Is Worth Living), the program schedule was heavy with local programming. Lynn Taylor hosted a talent show, a weeknight "Do It Yourself" show, and a teen program. Sportscaster Bob Fouts began commuting to Stockton from San Francisco to host a sports show, leaving KGO-TV in that city, and regional news coverage and a bingo program were also slated. Art Finley hosted an afternoon children's program, Toonytown, on the station for several years before moving to San Francisco's KRON-TV.

By 1955, the station had opened offices in San Francisco, where at one point it was proposed that NBC might try to affiliate with or purchase KOVR given discord with KRON-TV, its San Francisco affiliate, and a desire by NBC to own its San Francisco outlet. An attempt to move its main operation from Stockton to San Francisco was denied by the FCC as it would have stripped Stockton of its lone very high frequency (VHF) television station and there were already several television channels allotted to the Bay Area. The company did announce it would add a studio in San Francisco on a secondary basis. This studio was located in the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where the San Francisco offices were also relocated. In December 1955, Variety magazine reported that CBS, which coveted a VHF owned-and-operated station to serve San Francisco but had affiliate KPIX-TV there instead, was bidding on KOVR.