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Prime TV Allocations with political help

R

RadioDaze

A post in the "TV stations with Famous Owners" thread inspires this idea for another thread...Are there other examples of situations where a politician used their clout to land a prime TV allocation and/or exclude competiton?

For instance, Austin, Texas has (analog/virtually) only one VHF station, KTBC, channel 7, which was founded by the late Lady Bird Johnson. It's been mentioned in other threads that her husband Lyndon, then a powerful US Senator, may have swayed Austin getting this prime VHF channel and no competition.

Columbia, South Carolina, is another one-VHF town with WIS-TV, channel 10 dominating. I've often wondered if Senator Strom Thurmond, himself very powerful, had some involvement in this.

Others??
 
Sen. Bill Bradley used his political clout to help RKO General retain their license for WOR-TV in the early 1980s. The allocation was moved from New York NY to Secaucus NJ.
 
Rep. Alvin E. O'Konski (R-WI) got the Ironwood MI allocation and a long-dormant CP (WJMS-TV) for Channel 12 moved to Rhinelander WI so he could start WAEO-TV there (now WJFW) in 1966. He owned the station while still in office.

And, I'm sure that political clout had nothing to do with Gov. (and former Senator) Ernest McFarland (D-AZ) getting the license for KTVK Channel 3 (Phoenix's last unoccupied commercial VHF allocation) in 1955. ;D
 
It's been said Indiana Senator Homer Capehart encouraged the Channel 7 allocation move from Louisville to Evansville so that part of Indiana would have a VHF commercial allocation. Channel 9, which proceeded Channel 7, was deemed non-commercial despite appeals to change the designation.

dhett said:
Sen. Bill Bradley used his political clout to help RKO General retain their license for WOR-TV in the early 1980s. The allocation was moved from New York NY to Secaucus NJ.
Click to expand...

Essentially there was scenario created where an allocation could forgo a full hearing for license review if they would move their COL to a state without a VHF allocation. RKO General took advantage and moved the COL to Secaucus, NJ as to avoid the messy hearings. RKO General was on thin ice with the FCC over many things. A search of the google will explain the details.
 
Pittsburgh has two.

WQED 13, the first community-owned Public station, had tons of help from well-connected Pittsburgh political figures who helped broker a deal for Westinghouse to give up the channel 13 allocation in exchange for purchasing WDTV 3, which became KDKA 2.

WTAE 4, supposedly exists largely due to the efforts of then-Pittsburgh Mayor David Lawrence, a very well-connected Democrat, who felt his city should have a full time VHF affiliate for each of the 3 networks.
(WTAE was very short-spaced during it's time on VHF 4. Washington, DC, 240 miles SE, Buffalo, NY, 220
miles N, Columbus, OH just 180 miles W.)
 
radiorob2.0 said:
dhett said:
Sen. Bill Bradley used his political clout to help RKO General retain their license for WOR-TV in the early 1980s. The allocation was moved from New York NY to Secaucus NJ.
Click to expand...

Essentially there was scenario created where an allocation could forgo a full hearing for license review if they would move their COL to a state without a VHF allocation. RKO General took advantage and moved the COL to Secaucus, NJ as to avoid the messy hearings. RKO General was on thin ice with the FCC over many things. A search of the google will explain the details.
Click to expand...

Correct. Sen. Bradley sponsored the bill that created that scenario. See Wikipedia RKO General article.
 
FreddyE1977 said:
(WTAE was very short-spaced during it's time on VHF 4. Washington, DC, 240 miles SE, Buffalo, NY, 220
miles N, Columbus, OH just 180 miles W.)
Click to expand...

Not to dispute the rest of your post, but these listed separations are not short-spaced. In Zone I, where Pittsburgh (and the other three cities) is, the minimum spacing on VHF was 170 miles.
 
Interesting. I may be the victim of some faulty info. Most Pittsburgh TV towers were in close, just north of downtown.
But WTAE was way out at the southeastern tip of Allegheny County (it never came in well at my house during the Rabbit Ear
years). Supposedly this is because the station was originally licensed to Westmoreland County, closer to Johnstown.
But David Lawrence prevailed on his contacts to get it moved in closer to Pittsburgh. This site in southern Allegheny
County was allegedly as close as they could get while still protecting 4 in Columbus.
 
...one example that didn't work out was the attempt by The Hearst Corporation, with the aggressive assistance of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, to get Channel 10 reallocated to Milwaukee for commercial broadcasting (it had been allocated to Milwaukee for educational broadcasting in 1952). Hearst owned the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper at the time, which was McCarthy's best media friend in the state of Wisconsin; the other big paper in Milwaukee, the Journal, owned WTMJ-TV/3 (which shifted to Channel 4 a few months later). The Journal, it turned out, was sitting on hard evidence of McCarthy's closeted homosexuality, and as a result Mac The Knife desperately did whatever he could to needle the Journal. McCarthy even tried in vain to keep the FCC from ruling against Hearst by calling three FCC commissioners to his office on the day the ruling was expected to be handed down, and kept the commissioners there for the rest of the business day! It didn't work, and just over a year later Hearst bought WTVW/12 from Milwaukee Area Telecasting, turning it into WISN-TV (after Hearst's long-established radio station there)...
 
FreddyE1977 said:
Interesting. I may be the victim of some faulty info. Most Pittsburgh TV towers were in close, just north of downtown.
But WTAE was way out at the southeastern tip of Allegheny County (it never came in well at my house during the Rabbit Ear
years). Supposedly this is because the station was originally licensed to Westmoreland County, closer to Johnstown.
But David Lawrence prevailed on his contacts to get it moved in closer to Pittsburgh. This site in southern Allegheny
County was allegedly as close as they could get while still protecting 4 in Columbus.
Click to expand...

It probably was due to Columbus. I just ran the math, and the distance between the last licensed location of WTAE's analog facility and that of channel 4 in Columbus are 172.1 miles apart.

I've never heard of the station being licensed to any community besides Pittsburgh, but that doesn't mean it wasn't. There were some surprises in the past listings, for example channel 6 being licensed to Whitefish Bay, Wis. instead of adjacent Milwaukee. (due to a short spacing with Davenport, Iowa)
 
or more recently WPCB-TV 40 which identifies itself as "Greeensburg-Pittsburgh"
being licensed to Wall Borough (pop. 13)
 
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