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Worst TV stations ever

There must have been a few NBC stations in the Eastern Time Zone that aired Today from 8 to 10. WATR-TV (WCCT-TV) in Waterbury CT in the mid '70s comes to mind...and that station could qualify for this thread also.

Going back to Southern Ohio in this period this link will illustrate the situation in more detail.

TV Guide Southern Ohio edition, April 25, 1966
I don't do Facebook and couldn't access anything specific to Southern Ohio. The splash screen (or whatever you call it) showing what I assume is some kind of Manitoba-Saskatchewan edition is possibly the most fascinating TV Guide "channels listed" pages I've ever seen. (And no UHF stations!)
 
I don't do Facebook and couldn't access anything specific to Southern Ohio. The splash screen (or whatever you call it) showing what I assume is some kind of Manitoba-Saskatchewan edition is possibly the most fascinating TV Guide "channels listed" pages I've ever seen. (And no UHF stations!)
Took care of that.
(Part 1 of 2)
 

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One thing that jumps out at me, WCPO-9 didn't carry Walter Cronkite. You could only get it via WKEF-22, assuming Cincinnati viewers could pick it up.

I have to wonder if WCPO's management was so conservative, that they didn't want to carry Cronkite, but then again, he hadn't made his controversial "we cannot win this war" (Vietnam) commentary yet.
 
One thing that jumps out at me, WCPO-9 didn't carry Walter Cronkite. You could only get it via WKEF-22, assuming Cincinnati viewers could pick it up.

I have to wonder if WCPO's management was so conservative, that they didn't want to carry Cronkite, but then again, he hadn't made his controversial "we cannot win this war" (Vietnam) commentary yet.
This was of course the era where the 3 Dayton stations, 2, 7 and 22 were pot luck as far as network programming. There were no dedicated affiliates. WHIO-7 carried Huntley-Brinkley but a lot of CBS prime-time.
 
One thing that jumps out at me, WCPO-9 didn't carry Walter Cronkite. You could only get it via WKEF-22, assuming Cincinnati viewers could pick it up.

I have to wonder if WCPO's management was so conservative, that they didn't want to carry Cronkite, but then again, he hadn't made his controversial "we cannot win this war" (Vietnam) commentary yet.
The network newscasts weren't as important back then to a lot of affiliates. There was huge pushback when CBS and NBC went to 30 minutes in 1963. A lot of southern affiliates didn't want any "New York" news at all in the civil rights era. It wasn't until the end of the decade that Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley really got 100% national clearance.
 
This was of course the era where the 3 Dayton stations, 2, 7 and 22 were pot luck as far as network programming. There were no dedicated affiliates. WHIO-7 carried Huntley-Brinkley but a lot of CBS prime-time.
Not on this night. WHIO-TV aired just one CBS program, The Lucy Show. A rerun of Stoney Brook pre-empted the two CBS game shows, then 7 went with NBC from 9 to 11. WLWD spent the evening with ABC, but did run Carson. WKEF ran Hullabaloo from NBC at 7:30, but did its own thing after 8. CBS was the biggest loser that night in Dayton.
 
Not on this night. WHIO-TV aired just one CBS program, The Lucy Show. A rerun of Stoney Brook pre-empted the two CBS game shows, then 7 went with NBC from 9 to 11. WLWD spent the evening with ABC, but did run Carson. WKEF ran Hullabaloo from NBC at 7:30, but did its own thing after 8. CBS was the biggest loser that night in Dayton.
Dayton was (and is) a weird market. It stops midway between Dayton and Cincinnati, and then you have Darke, Shelby, and Miami counties where out-of-market stations would be difficult OTA. Back in those days, OTA viewers in such areas really had no way of getting network programming consistently, and possibly just accepted this as the natural order of things. If there were no such place as Dayton, those counties would be in the Cincinnati market by default. Clark and Greene counties would have been a toss-up, Greene possibly being Cincinnati, Clark probably being Columbus.

I've never been to Dayton. No real reason to go.
 
I had a very nice time in Dayton last summer on the way home from Fort Wayne - the Air Force Museum keeps growing and if you're into planes and space you could easily fill a whole day just there. There are several iterations of Air Force One you can walk through, including the one that took JFK to Dallas. There's a Space Shuttle, too.

And Carillon Park is a really neat local history museum which includes a Wright Brothers building and one of their original Flyers.
 
In my personal opinion this made for very bad television when in wichita falls tx/lawton Oklahoma KJTL FOX 18 and KJBO UPN 35 merged and moved in with the station with the biggest building NBC KFDX-TV 3, this happened in 1999 and KJTL had been at call field road since may 1985 and KJBO had been together with KJTL since 1988 or 1993, they stopped running a lot of the good ABC and FOX originals ( hangin with mr cooper, living single, martin ) once the contracts expired in June 2000 and I've never liked either station the same ever since because they run and manage KJTL and KJBO just as badly and DEPLORABLY as they do nexstar and KFDX itself, I also would like to know exactly why they moved in with KFDX3 ( nexstar) via ssa and jsas, I found out that it was because the building was sold and KJTL/KJBO had to be out, I guess they had to be out in some very strict no notice time crunch, and I guess they had to be out of the building once it got sold because the owner of the building wanted more MONEY than either KJTL or KJBO had ??. I guess it was one of those a many abound n plentiful " it was nice while it lasted " things I just wish it could have lasted three more years. Or if they hadn't merged with KFDX3 they could have wound up like FOX 60 WYVN in Virginia with no money and or nowhere to house either tv station.
 
Or if they hadn't merged with KFDX3 they could have wound up like FOX 60 WYVN in Virginia with no money and or nowhere to house either tv station.

The story of WYVN Martinsburg WV is a sad one. They started out as a Fox station, but had all sorts of financial and technical difficulties from the get-go. Here's the story:

https://www.radiodiscussions.com/th...60-martinsburg-wv-winchester-va-12-93.567518/

And this from Wikipedia:

WWPX-TV - Wikipedia

A Hagerstown-Martinsburg-Winchester market would have made sense --- it's just a little too far from Washington and Baltimore for good OTA reception without taking heroic measures such as high-gain antennas and high towers --- but I have to think that the DC and Harrisonburg markets would have had issues with fairly large pieces of their market being nibbled off, and aside from local news (and not even then, when the local news is nonexistent or of low quality), viewers often tend to prefer stations from larger and more cosmopolitan markets (which wouldn't have been an issue where Harrisonburg is concerned, but what the hay?).

In its incarnation as Ion affiliate WWPX, the station probably finds its highest and best use of a valuable high-VHF (OTA 13) frequency, but it's interesting to consider what a robust Shenandoah Valley TV market, with what in the digital era could entail all of the major networks on subchannels, could have looked like. For a time in (IIRC) the 1980s, Hagerstown was actually a single-county, single-station (WHAG) free-standing market, but that wasn't bound to last long, as aside from local news (they did their best and met a local need), there was no way WHAG could compete with WRC and WMAR (and later WBAL). And when Washington County MD was reabsorbed back into the DC market, NBC wasn't about to put up with a secondary affiliate on the western fringes of its market. Look at what happened to WMGM and KENV in the Philadelphia and Salt Lake City markets respectively --- the latter was a serious loss for Elko County viewers, as that was their only way of having local news, SLC stations aren't going to cover anything in Elko. A remote station in a rural area. such as KENV, having TBD as their network affiliation, without local news that they can't possibly sustain financially, is about as useless as vestigial mammary glands on a boar hog. Total waste of spectrum.

Local stations in remote areas are at their best advantage when they can work out something with a larger co-owned station in their market, to take advantage of their resources and branding, to produce a quality local news product. No station exemplifies this better than WYMT Hazard KY, which is a semi-satellite of WKYT Lexington, and produces a high-caliber local news broadcast using both their own resources and those of WKYT (as well as simulcasting WKYT news in certain dayparts), the end result being that rural Eastern Kentucky has some of the best small-town local news coverage in the United States. The area is historically in economically (as well as geographically) challenging conditions, and benefits greatly from this.
 
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It goes double for KENV, as Sinclair also owns KUTV (CBS) in the SLC market. Did they ever consider switching KENV from NBC // KRNV to CBS // KUTV?

That would work, I didn't think of that, and on top of that, KUTV could allow KENV to simulcast news from KRNV, possibly with local news cut-ins similar to how KOB used to do with its satellite stations in New Mexico. Not sure how they'd handle the difference in the time zones, maybe do some kind of time-shifting, or just run one of the KRNV newscasts live and allow it to bump aside the KUTV offering (e.g., run a half-hour of KRNV's 5 pm news on KENV instead of KUTV's 6 pm show), that would be the simplest option. That way KENV viewers get at least some in-state Nevada news along with the cut-ins. Wonder if anyone at Sinclair has ever thought of that?

I saw KOBF in Farmington and their cut-in was nothing fancy, basically an anchor at a desk, but it met a need for locally-oriented news. You're not going to get that on a statewide KOB feed.
 
I saw KOBF in Farmington and their cut-in was nothing fancy, basically an anchor at a desk, but it met a need for locally-oriented news. You're not going to get that on a statewide KOB feed.
I remember watching a KOBF, Farmington, NM 10PM news cut-in when I was staying, with some family members, at a motel near Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Eastern Arizona back in 2004.
 


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