KSAT-TV

• 1. Introduction

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  KSAT-TV, channel 12 in San Antonio, Texas, went on the air for the first time on the 21st of January 1957, with a broadcast of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration at 10 a.m. That choice of first program was not accidental. It announced something: this was a station that intended to put its viewers at the center of national history. But getting to that January morning had taken nearly five years of competing applications, regulatory battles, and a fight that reached all the way to federal oral arguments before the FCC. How does a television station earn its place in a city? What does it take to survive network defections, near-sales, and the death of a colleague on a dark rural road? And how does a station that opened with a presidential inauguration end up in a Hollywood comedy decades later? Channel 12's story runs deeper than most viewers ever suspect.

• 2. The Battle for Channel 12

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  The first application for channel 12 arrived at regulators in June 1952, filed by Bexar County Television Corporation, a subsidiary of Alamo Broadcasting Company. That applicant had an obvious reason to want the ABC Television affiliation: its parent company already ran KABC, a radio station with an ABC network tie. A second applicant, Mission Broadcasting Company, owners of KONO radio at 860 AM and 92.9 FM, soon followed. By 1953, both of those original bidders had dropped out entirely. Two fresh applicants stepped in: Sunshine Broadcasting Company, then the owners of KTSA radio, and Mission Telecasting Company. Mission Telecasting was majority-owned, at 50 percent, by Eugene J. Roth, the principal owner of Mission Broadcasting, with the remaining half divided among seven other individuals. Sunshine eventually withdrew, but in January 1954 a fourth contender appeared: the Walmac Corporation, owners of KMAC radio. In May 1954, Walmac and Mission tried to negotiate a settlement rather than endure a prolonged hearing. The effort failed. On the 12th of March 1956, the FCC heard final oral arguments between the two parties; an FCC examiner had already sided with Mission the year before. The FCC granted Mission the license in May 1956, and Walmac's bid was denied. Mission officials then built a new 16,000-square-foot studio building and a 574-foot tower on North St. Mary's Street, next door to the existing KONO radio studios.

• 3. First Signals, First Program

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  The original target for going on the air was the 1st of December 1956, but the station did not begin regular testing until the evening of the 14th of January 1957. Assistant station manager Jack Roth reported that viewers from as far away as Corpus Christi, Austin, Kerrville, Boerne, and Camp Wood were already picking up the test pattern. The station launched in earnest a week later as KONO-TV, taking its call letters from the partially co-owned KONO radio stations. It became San Antonio's fourth television station and the third to broadcast in English. Channel 12 has carried the ABC affiliation continuously since that debut, more or less by default, given the radio heritage that shaped the original application. The sale that ended Mission's ownership came on the 31st of July 1967, when Mission chairman Eugene Roth announced a deal with The Outlet Company, based in Providence, Rhode Island, for $10.5 million. Roth explained that rising costs in the rapidly growing television industry were the driving factor. The call letters that viewers know today, KSAT-TV, arrived when Outlet took control in January 1968 and announced the change effective February 1 of that year, required by an FCC rule barring stations under different ownership from sharing the same base call sign.

• 4. Near Misses and New Owners

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  Outlet went private in 1986, and the company's new owners sold KSAT to H&C Communications. The ABC affiliation nearly changed hands in 1990, when management at rival station KENS opened discussions about switching to ABC, citing poor CBS programming performance as a threat to KENS's overall dominance in San Antonio. Negotiations ultimately went nowhere. Both KENS and KSAT signed new affiliation agreements with CBS and ABC respectively in August of that year. KSAT came close to a different kind of sale in 1992, when Young Broadcasting nearly purchased the station; that deal collapsed when Young failed to secure financing. On the 22nd of April 1994, H&C sold KSAT along with Houston sister station KPRC-TV to The Washington Post Company, which placed both stations within its Post-Newsweek Stations subsidiary. In the early 2000s, Post-Newsweek tried a unified on-air brand called "Local" across most of its stations; KSAT briefly became "Local 12" in 2004 before returning to "KSAT 12." The call letters are pronounced syllabically as "K-Sat." The old studio building on St. Mary's Street gave way in March 2014 to a new two-story facility built on what had been the station's parking lot, complete with a large newsroom, a courtyard with outdoor seating, and a grill and garden area for staff.

• 5. Anchors, Tragedy, and the Newsroom

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  Weeknight co-anchor Leslie Mouton was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002. Rather than step away from the desk, Mouton chose to anchor the evening newscasts without a wig while undergoing chemotherapy, as the treatment caused her to lose her hair. She documented her treatment and recovery on KSAT's own air, drawing praise from local oncologists and cancer patients. In 2004, Mouton recounted her experience on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired on KSAT at the time; the episode included clips of her first on-air appearance after losing her hair and the explanation she gave viewers then. Before Mouton's story came a far harder one. On the 26th of March 1999, anchor and reporter Michelle Lima was killed while working live coverage of a search for a 9-year-old boy in southern Bexar County. As she helped pack up equipment for a future assignment, Lima was struck by a truck on a dark rural frontage road. She was airlifted to a local hospital and pronounced dead two days later. She was 30 years old. KSAT became the second San Antonio station to broadcast local newscasts in high definition on the 5th of February 2009. The station later expanded its 10 p.m. newscast to a full hour on the 12th of September 2011, making it one of only a few Big Three affiliates in the country to carry an hour-long late evening broadcast. That extended format ran until early 2019, when a new ABC affiliation contract required all affiliates to carry Jimmy Kimmel Live at 10:35 p.m.

• 6. Sports, Culture, and the Screen

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  KSAT airs select San Antonio Spurs games through the NBA's television contract with the network. The station carried four of the Spurs' five NBA Finals victories, in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014, along with the team's Finals appearances in 2013 and 2026. Local programming includes SA Live, a one-hour lifestyle and variety show airing weekdays at 10 a.m. The station also produced Instant Replay, an hour-long sports highlight and discussion program that ran Sunday nights at 11 p.m. until its cancellation in March 2025. Channel 12 also made an unlikely appearance in popular culture through the 2000 comedy film Miss Congeniality, which was set around a beauty pageant in San Antonio. The production used KSAT live trucks and microphones bearing the station's mic flags, though none of the station's actual staff appeared on screen. Actors playing a KSAT reporter and news photographer appear in a scene at The Alamo in which FBI agent Gracie Hart, played by Sandra Bullock, is interviewed. On the 6th of May 2024, KSAT converted from an ATSC 1.0 signal to ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV broadcasting, becoming the lighthouse host for ATSC 3.0 transmission of five San Antonio stations: KENS, KLRN, KSAT-TV, KWEX-DT, and KVDA.