KSL-TV (channel 5) is a television station in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is the sole television property of locally based Bonneville International, the for-profit broadcasting arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and is sister to radio stations KSL (1160 AM) and KSL-FM (102.7). The three stations share studios at the Broadcast House building in Salt Lake City's Triad Center; KSL-TV's transmitter is located on Farnsworth Peak in the Oquirrh Mountains, southwest of Salt Lake City. The station has a large network of broadcast translators that extend its over-the-air coverage throughout Utah, as well as portions of Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.
KSL-TV is one of a few for-profit U.S. television stations owned by a religious institution (most U.S. TV stations owned by religious institutions are affiliated with non-profit religious broadcasting networks).
History Primary CBS affiliate Radio Service Corporation of Utah, owner of KSL (1160 AM), filed an application for a construction permit on May 26, 1948, and was granted it on July 29. (Guide to reading History Cards) Television in Salt Lake City was first conducted by KSL in 1946.
The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1949, operating from studios in the Union Pacific Building on Main Street. It was owned by the Deseret News, who also owned KSL radio (1160 AM and 100.3 FM, now KSFI). It originally operated as a CBS affiliate, owing to its sister radio station's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. In addition to its primary CBS affiliation, the station also shared ABC programming with NBC affiliate KDYL-TV (channel 4, now KTVX). The two stations continued to share ABC programming until KUTV (channel 2) signed on in September 1954 as the market's full-time ABC affiliate. The station also broadcast some programming from the DuMont Television Network, and during the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
A few months after its sign-on, KSL moved its operations to studio facilities at the Broadcast House on Social Hall Avenue. In 1952, a transmission tower was constructed on Farnsworth Peak to improve the station's signal coverage along the Wasatch Front and into Tooele County. It also began building a massive translator network that eventually stretched across five states.
When KSL first began broadcasting, all programs were produced locally or recorded content from out of the area (such as delayed kinescope recordings). This changed in 1951, when AT&T completed their coast-to-coast microwave relay network allowing the station to tap into live television feeds from its affiliated networks. KSL first broadcast live network programming on September 30, 1951, with a broadcast of ABC's Paul Whiteman's Goodyear Revue. Prior to this, KSL had been producing 40 live shows weekly.
The KSL stations operated as a division of the Deseret News until 1964, when Bonneville International was formed as the parent company for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)'s broadcasting holdings. Soon afterward, channel 5 began broadcasting its programming in color. In 1984, the station moved to its current facility at Triad Center, also named Broadcast House.
Switch to NBC affiliate
In July 1994, CBS and Westinghouse Broadcasting (Group W) agreed to a long-term affiliation deal for the five Group W television stations, including longtime NBC affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia. That November, NBC agreed to trade their stations KCNC-TV and KUTV (which was acquired by NBC earlier that year) to CBS in return for CBS's former station in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV, as a result of a complex ownership deal between the network, Westinghouse and NBC.CBS, NBC Changing Channels , South Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 22, 1994. NBC also traded their VHF channel 4 frequency and transmitter in Miami (then home to WTVJ) to CBS in exchange for the channel 6 frequency in Miami (then home to WCIX, which subsequently became WFOR-TV). The deal took effect on September 10, 1995, resulting in the first network affiliation switch in Salt Lake City since KTVX swapped affiliations with KUTV and became an ABC affiliate in 1960. Initially, NBC sought to reaffiliate with KTVX; but after that station renewed its affiliation agreement with ABC, NBC then secured an affiliation deal with KSL-TV. KUTV continued to air one NBC program, Saturday Night Live, for five more months until January 1996, when it was moved to then-WB affiliate KOOG-TV (now CW station KUCW).
On January 14, 1999, a shooter entered the station's Broadcast House facility, allegedly looking for a KSL-TV reporter. Anne Sleater, an employee of another company that was housed in the building, AT&T Wireless Services, was shot during the incident and later died from her injuries. De-Kieu Duy, a 24-year-old female, was arrested in connection with the shooting. Duy was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial and housed in the Utah State Hospital.
In 2002, Bruce Christensen was named the president of KSL-TV; Christensen was a former president of PBS, the former dean of the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications, as well as a former KSL-TV reporter. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, KSL-TV was very influential in bringing coverage and technology to NBC. The station heavily lobbied to NBC that the Games be broadcast live locally.
In July 2010, KSL-TV entered into a local marketing agreement (LMA) with independent station KJZZ-TV (channel 14), after the LMA between that station and KUTV concluded after five years; the LMA was terminated in 2016, after KUTV's owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, purchased KJZZ.
Programming In addition to locally produced news and sports programs, and syndicated shows, KSL broadcasts most of the programs seen on NBC's schedule.
Due to its ties to the LDS Church, KSL-TV also airs programs relevant to Mormonism, such as History of the Saints, Music and the Spoken Word and Mormon Times, and preempts regularly scheduled programming to carry the twice yearly LDS General Conference. KSL-TV is one of the few remaining television stations in the United States that still "signs off" at night (though only nominally, because programming immediately continues afterward), doing so at 3:30 a.m. on Sundays.
Program preemptions and deferrals Historically, KSL-TV has been known to occasionally preempt or assign out-of-pattern scheduling to certain network programs, either to make room for other local or syndicated programs or because of internal concerns over subject matter that station management deems objectionable, typically due to conflicts with to longstanding LDS Church beliefs. (Many of these preempted programs have aired instead on KUCW (channel 30) or KMYU (channel 12) over the years.) Preemptions based on content objections have periodically led to inquiries over the sustainability of a religious institution owning a network-affiliated station as content standards and practices in broadcast television have relaxed in recent decades in a reflection of cultural change.
As a CBS affiliate, in 1977, Match Game host Gene Rayburn mentioned that the often risque then-CBS daytime game show was not being aired in Salt Lake City. In 1987, the station was among several affiliates that announced that it would not air the children's animated series Garbage Pail Kids ahead of its originally scheduled premiere amid criticism from parental organizations over concerns about the show's violent content and humor ridiculing the handicapped and the perceived likelihood of it merely being a program-length ad for the controversial namesake toys and trading cards. (Amid the controversy, CBS elected not to air it in the U.S., though its distribution arm syndicated it in some international markets.) In the years leading to its switch to NBC, KSL also preempted the 1989–91 sitcom Doctor Doctor (partway into its third and final season in November 1990), and three shorter-lived series—Dirty Dancing (in 1988), prime time soap opera 2000 Malibu Road and adult-oriented sitcom Grapevine (both in 1992)—because of their sexual content. KSL removed Picket Fences midway through its first season, partly due to objections over a January 1993 episode ("Nuclear Meltdowns") centering on a teenage girl who becomes pregnant through an incestuous plural marriage with a polygamist Mormon and the perpetrator's allusion that, although plural marriage within the LDS Church ceased after the 1890 Manifesto (issued in response to Congressional acts to disincorporate and seize assets of the church over the practice), many Mormons still held polygamist beliefs. The drama series returned to KSL in its normal network time slot in April 1993, before being shifted to a one-day delay at 11 p.m. on Saturdays for its second season in September 1993."NBC finalizes Salt Lake station deal." - Adweek Western Edition January 2, 1995. The station refused CBS's late night Crimetime After Primetime block from September 1990 until its discontinuation after the August 1993 premiere of Late Show with David Letterman (though this was based more on retaining local control of its late night schedule than over content concerns after the failure of the preceding Pat Sajak Show), and preempted the network's Saturday morning children's program lineup after September 1989. It also was among several Mountain Time CBS stations that aired CBS This Morning and its predecessors on a one-hour-ahead basis (from 6 to 8 a.m.) until it shifted the morning show in-pattern in September 1994 to accommodate an expanded (and relocated, as it was moved up two hours to 6 a.m.) local morning newscast.
As an NBC affiliate, KSL declined to air Saturday Night Live throughout its first 18 years with the network; despite this, between 1995 and 2013, the station carried all of the long-running sketch comedy's "best-of" compilations, actor tributes, documentary specials and Saturday evening repeats that NBC aired in prime time. Unlike most of the later preemptions, while potentially objectionable content in the series were somewhat an issue for the station (NBC rebuffed KSL management inquiries about delaying SNL to midnight), the decision was largely made to retain its popular local sports discussion and highlight program SportsBeat Saturday. SNL initially remained on KUTV under arrangement with CBS until January 1996, before moving to then-WB affiliate KOOG. In June 2013, KSL announced that it would start airing SNL in its regular timeslot beginning that fall, after revealing that viewership for SportsBeat had declined in recent years (and was also being beaten by the similar KUTV program Talkin' Sports in its slot); the Utah Utes playing more later evening games against West Coast opponents following its 2011 shift to the Pac-12 Conference from the Mountain West Conference (which played most of its football games in the afternoon) had also made it difficult for SportsBeat to analyze, carry, and package highlights of games that were often still in progress as it aired. KSL-TV also did not air the 1997–99 NBC daytime soap opera Sunset Beach; the soap was seen locally on KOOG instead.