KCBS-TV

KCBS-TV (channel 2), branded CBS LA, is a television station in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the West Coast flagship station of the CBS television network, owned and operated through its CBS News and Stations division. Under common ownership with independent station KCAL-TV (channel 9), the two outlets share studios at the Radford Studio Center on Radford Avenue in the Studio City section of Los Angeles; KCBS-TV's transmitter is located on the western side of Mount Wilson near Occidental Peak.

Aside from being affiliated with CBS News, since 2017, KCBS-TV has had no connection to KCBS radio (740 AM) in San Francisco. The 2017 sale to Entercom (now Audacy) of KCBS radio and KCBS-FM (93.1) in Los Angeles ended almost seven decades of co-ownership among the three stations under CBS.

KCBS-TV is the oldest continuously operating television station in the Western United States.^{[citation needed]} It was signed on by Don Lee Broadcasting, which owned a chain of radio stations on the Pacific coast, and was first licensed by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as experimental television station W6XAO in June 1931. The station went on the air on December 23, 1931, and by March 1933 was broadcasting programming one hour each day on Mondays through Saturdays. The station used a mechanical camera, which broadcast only film footage in an 80-line image, but used all-electronic receivers as early as 1932. It went off the air in 1935, and then reappeared using an improved mechanical camera producing a 300-line image in June 1936. By August 1937, W6XAO had programming six days each week, with live programming starting in April 1938.

By 1939, the station used a fully electronic system and the image quality was improved to 441 lines. At the time, an optimistic estimate of the station's viewership was 1,500 people. Many of the receiver sets were built by television hobbyists, though commercially made sets were available in Los Angeles. The station's six-day weekly schedule consisted of live talent on four nights, and films on two nights. By 1942, there were an estimated 400–500 television sets in the Los Angeles area, with Don Lee Broadcasting placing television receivers at the following public places: Wilshire Brown Derby, Kiefer's Pine Knot Drive-In, Vine Street Brown Derby, Griffith Planetarium, Miramar Hotel (Santa Monica), Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and The Town House on Wilshire Boulevard. During World War II, programming was reduced to three hours, every other Monday. The station's frequency was switched from Channel 1 to Channel 2 in March 1946 when the FCC decided to reserve Channel 1 for low-power community television stations, before eliminating it completely. The station was granted a commercial license (the second in California, behind KTLA) as KM2XBD, but calling it KTSL, on May 6, 1948 (and officially changed the call sign to KTSL on October 9, 1950), and was named for Thomas S. Lee, the son of Don Lee. The station became affiliated with the DuMont Television Network later that year. KTSL also launched Peter Potter's Jukebox Jury that year, a musical/quiz series that began to be broadcast nationally during the 1953–1954 season on ABC.

Starting in 1949, CBS had been affiliated with KTTV (channel 11, now a Fox owned-and-operated station), a station in which the network held a 49% minority ownership stake.

Don Lee's broadcasting interests were placed for sale in 1950 following the death of Thomas S. Lee. General Tire and Rubber agreed to purchase all of Don Lee's stations, the centerpiece being KHJ radio, but chose to spin off KTSL to CBS. Subsequently, CBS sold its share in KTTV to the station's majority partner, the Los Angeles Times, and all CBS programming moved to KTSL on January 1, 1951. On October 28, 1951, KTSL changed its callsign to KNXT (presumably meaning "KNX Television") to coincide with CBS' Los Angeles radio outlet, KNX (1070 AM). The station also moved its transmitter from Mount Lee, where it had been based since its experimental days, to Mount Wilson.

On April 2, 1984, at noon, KNXT changed its call letters to the present KCBS-TV. The former KNXT call letters were later used by an unrelated TV station (now KIFR) in Fresno from 1986 to 2021. In 1997, it adopted the "CBS2" moniker for its on-air image, following the lead of sister stations WBBM-TV in Chicago and WCBS-TV in New York City. For a time during the 1980s and 1990s, KNXT/KCBS-TV had several locally produced programs such as 2 on the Town, a local show similar to Evening Magazine and KABC-TV's Eye on L.A., and KidQuiz, a Saturday morning children's game show hosted by longtime weathercaster Maclovio Perez (for a time in the mid-2000s, its sister station KCAL-TV had broadcast a show called 9 on the Town).

In 2002, KCBS-TV became a sister station to KCAL-TV after the latter was purchased by Viacom from Young Broadcasting.