KSMO-TV (channel 62) is an independent television station in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, which has a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Gray Media alongside CBS affiliate KCTV (channel 5). The two stations share studios on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas; KSMO-TV's transmitter is located in Independence, Missouri.
Channel 62 in Kansas City began broadcasting as KEKR-TV in 1983, changing its call letters to KZKC in 1985. Originally owned by Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee, it suffered for most of its first decade on air from a management style more suited to stations in smaller markets, inferior programming, and a poor reputation. In 1988, the station was fined for airing an indecent film in prime time, attracting national attention. Financial issues also strapped KZKC, particularly after Media Central entered bankruptcy reorganization in 1987.
KZKC was sold out of bankruptcy to First American National Bank of Nashville, Tennessee, in early 1990; the bank quickly sold the station to ABRY Communications. ABRY instituted a top-to-bottom overhaul of programming and facilities, changing the call letters to KSMO-TV in April 1991. The relaunched channel 62 cemented itself as the primary sports and children's station in Kansas City; from 1990 to 1995, viewership tripled and advertising revenue quadrupled. ABRY affiliated the station with UPN upon its January 1995 debut. The station also was the broadcast home of Kansas City Royals baseball for four years, further increasing its visibility.
Sinclair Broadcast Group exercised an option to buy KSMO-TV in December 1995. The station dropped UPN in January 1998 after a corporate dispute between Sinclair and the network; two months later, the station became the new Kansas City affiliate of The WB. With the company focusing on duopolies elsewhere and unable to buy a second station in Kansas City, Sinclair sold KSMO-TV to the Meredith Corporation, then-owner of KCTV, in 2005 after Meredith assumed operating control the year before. The station affiliated with MyNetworkTV upon the merger of UPN and The WB into The CW in 2006, and it also added newscasts from KCTV and other local programming to its lineup. Gray acquired Meredith in 2021, the same year that the station converted to ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) broadcasting.
History KEKR-TV: Construction and launch Several applications had been made for channel 62 in Kansas City in the late 1960s, including by Dick Bailey and TVue Associates, but interest around the channel allocation started in earnest at the end of the 1970s, as several business ventures around the country analyzed using unused UHF channels in major cities to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming. In 1977, Buford Television of Tyler, Texas, and SelecTV of Kansas City, Inc., both made applications to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to establish channel 62 in Kansas City and use it to broadcast STV to paying subscribers, even though Kansas City had an area-wide cable system.
After reaching a settlement with Buford that gave it the right to buy stock in SelecTV of Kansas City, that company was granted the construction permit on April 8, 1981, but channel 62 continued to sit unbuilt for more than two years. The permittee changed its name from SelecTV of Kansas City to Choice Channel of Kansas City in 1982, a year in which Kansas City and its metropolitan area were wired for cable at an accelerated pace and the national economic picture for STV began to sour. Choice Channel of Kansas City then took on a new majority investor: Media Central Inc. of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which purchased a 60 percent interest in the station in February 1983. With Media Central on board, consideration of STV service was dropped and an agreement reached to co-locate its transmitting facility with public television station KCPT. Media Central used modular construction methods: studio equipment was assembled in Chattanooga before being shipped to Kansas City for installation once the studio facility was completed. However, its construction methods ultimately resulted in subpar equipment and poorer reception; at one time, the station volunteered to send repairmen to homes experiencing difficulty tuning it in. In a January 1988 article in Channels magazine, a former station employee was quoted as saying that the high school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, had better equipment than channel 62, though Media Central's corporate office in Chattanooga did have high-quality equipment.
KEKR-TV—whose call letters represented an attorney who helped file for the license—debuted on December 7, 1983, from studios in Blue Summit. It was the first new station in Kansas City since KYFC-TV, a Christian television station, began in 1978, and it was the first new general-entertainment independent since KSHB-TV went on the air as KBMA-TV in 1970. Programming consisted primarily of classic reruns, as well as a handful of first-run and new shows in the Kansas City area and Big Eight Conference college basketball. The station, however, was far from an immediate success. In its first year on air, it attracted just three percent of the Kansas City viewing audience, well below the six to eight percent its founding program director had set as a goal. The station's lone bright spot was that it was drawing young people to watch cartoons in mornings and afternoons. A new general manager, Steve Friedheim, was appointed in a management shakeup; when he attempted to gather public feedback, he found that nobody had heard of his station. Three of his colleagues at his former employer, independent station WNOL-TV in New Orleans, followed him to Kansas City amid turmoil at the New Orleans station.
KZKC: Revamp and indecency dispute After a year, Media Central sought to turn the ailing station around by spending more money on programming and overhauling its image. In January 1985, the station changed its call sign to KZKC-TV, having decided not to purchase the designation KCKC from a radio station in California. The new call sign did attract attention—from KCTV, the Kansas City CBS affiliate, which sued channel 62 a month after it made the change, citing a potential likelihood of confusion. The lawsuit was heard by a federal judge in June 1986, and the judge ordered KZKC-TV to simply become KZKC without the suffix. In another fruitless attempt to improve its image, the station filed for channel 32 when the FCC made it available in Kansas City; however, with multiple applicants proposing new stations in the market, an FCC administrative law judge ruled against its bid in 1991 and in favor of another group.
One way the station tried to attract interest was its policy to only edit films where there were explicit sexual acts, leading to occasional shots of nudity. On May 26, 1987, even after announcing it would start censoring frontal nudity the year before, KZKC aired the 1981 comedy-drama film Private Lessons, known for its frontal nudity and a plot involving a relationship between a high school student and a maid, in prime time. Acting on a viewer complaint, the FCC opened an investigation into the station's broadcast of the film in January 1988, with possible sanctions including a formal reprimand, a fine, or even revocation of the station's broadcast license. The case shed light on the practice of "stacking" titillating movies for ratings sweeps periods several times a year, a practice followed throughout Media Central's eight-station chain of independents.
The FCC—operating with just three of five commissioners at the time—unanimously agreed the material was obscene and, on a 2–1 vote, fined KZKC $2,000 in June 1988. The fine represented the first punishment of a television station for airing obscene programming. Media Central chairman Morton Kent called the fine "outrageous" and declared to Dennis McDougal of the Los Angeles Times that he would not pay. However, the commission rescinded the fine in 1989 after a court ruling overturned changes to its "safe harbor" for indecent programming.
By the time of the indecency investigation, Media Central had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization; in July 1987, the parent company and its eight stations—KZKC initially the lone exception—presented petitions for reorganization. The firm had $68 million in assets but owed $50 million to creditors, including program suppliers; KZKC's reorganization plan stated that paying off its debts could take 10 years. The station's front office urged general manager Friedheim to barter advertising for goods and services wherever possible to save money. The disposition of the company's stations lasted three years. Only in March 1989 did a Chattanooga bankruptcy court begin considering plans to sell some of the Media Central stations, eventually approving a purchase of KZKC by one of Media Central's creditors, First American National Bank of Nashville, Tennessee. First American then contracted Act III Broadcasting, an Atlanta-based company with significant operations in Nashville, to run the station. This was heavily delayed by appeals in federal court. While that went on, Steve Engles—who then left when his bid to purchase Media Central-owned KBSI in Cape Girardeau was approved—improved KZKC's programming, signal, and on-air look.
KSMO-TV: The independent rebuild On February 7, 1990, a subsidiary of First American National Bank received KZKC's license, with Act III taking over management duties. This was a short-term solution; Act III's contract precluded it from buying KZKC, and Act III president Bert Ellis noted that the bank was interested in selling. Two and a half months later, the bank filed to sell the station to ABRY Communications. ABRY, which owned two independent stations in Baltimore and Cincinnati, promised to spend millions of dollars to replace the transmitting facility and purchase new movies for air on the station. Additionally, the company announced it would move the station to new studios. Even before the sale closed, the station aimed to prepare for a major overhaul and to capitalize on KSHB-TV, its primary competitor, having an increasing obligation to Fox programs. It lured a series of college basketball broadcasts from channel 41 in part by having time to air Kansas and Kansas State coaches' shows.
Many major changes and a large promotion campaign were implemented in March and April 1991. A three-week "Your Vote Counts" campaign was begun in March; ballots were placed at points around the city to allow viewers to vote on programming, following a model ABRY had successfully used at its WNUV in Baltimore. The next month, the station relocated to the Cambridge Circle office park in Kansas City, Kansas, in studios that were twice the size of the Blue Summit facility built by Media Central; the program lineup was shuffled, a new antenna was installed, and a children's club known as "Crew 62" was started. The station also changed its call sign to KSMO-TV, incorporating the postal abbreviations for Kansas and Missouri; a radio station in Salem, Missouri, agreed to share, and the O also allowed the station to insert a check mark in its logo in a nod to the voting campaign. The outgoing KZKC call sign was labeled by Jim McDonald as "probably the worst call letters that any station in America could have chosen", being tough to say and hard to remember to the point that some people noted in Nielsen Media Research ratings diaries that they had watched programs which channel 62 carried but ascribed them to other local stations.