CBS 2 and KCAL 9 rebrand as "KCAL News".

[michael hagerty]

It was a titanically awful deal that hurt many of those stations (WJW and KTSP tanked badly and KTBC never recovered) and Fox had to bail out the company two years later.

And honestly, if the NFL wasn’t satisfied with Fox’s affiliate base, they would have never signed the deal in the first place. They only cared about money. I highly doubt the myth that the NFL made Rupert make a deal with someone who bought Marvel Comics and infamously confused Spider-Man with Superman.

The real reason the deal even happened is because Rupert was a robber baron and Ron Perelman was in over his head.

Beyond the directly involved stations, the deal set off a chain reaction with affiliation swaps in 30 markets.

I was in Phoenix at the time, where FOX/New World took KTSP, the CBS affiliate, CBS jumped to Meredith independent KPHO, and ABC left family-owned KTVK for Scripps’ KNXV, which had been the FOX affiliate. KTVK became an independent . Only Gannett’s KPNX (NBC) was untouched.

Many of these shifts around the country were indirect, the result of group deals—-with, for example, Scripps insisting on ABC affiliations for UHFs in Phoenix and Tampa as a condition for not entertaining affiliation offers from CBS in Detroit and Cleveland.

 

[desertaire]

I was in Phoenix at the time, where FOX/New World took KTSP, the CBS affiliate
A year before the Fox switch, it had changed its call letters to KSAZ (The Spirit of Arizona)

 

[michael hagerty]

A year before the Fox switch, it had changed its call letters to KSAZ (The Spirit of Arizona)

Thanks. Had forgotten the sequence.