KOCR: Construction and financial woes
In January 1983, Stanley G. Emert Jr., an attorney from Knoxville, Tennessee, applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a new television station on ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 28 in Cedar Rapids.[1] A second application was filed by Metro Program Network, a company owned by Gerald Fitzgerald, on March 9.[2] Fitzgerald was a former communications professor at the University of Northern Iowa.[3] Both applications proposed the establishment of an independent station with movies and local programming. However, an FCC administrative law judge selected the Metro Program Network application in March 1985.[4] By July, the company also had construction permits for stations at Ames and Dubuque.[5]
Construction had accelerated by August 1987, when Fitzgerald announced he was negotiating to affiliate with Fox; studios on Boyson Road Northeast in Cedar Rapids were nearly complete.[6] KOCR began broadcasting on January 10, 1988, for three hours a day.[7] The first week contained unscheduled "previews" of the station's Fox and syndicated programming, as not all of the programs for which KOCR had paid had arrived.[8][9]
However, the station was unable to remain on the air at the outset. Before broadcasting, Fitzgerald sought to modify the construction permit to again reflect a Cedar Rapids transmitter site instead of one in Garrison, where Benton County officials declined to approve the erection of a taller tower. In what Fitzgerald later called a "procedural problem", the Garrison site was still active in FCC records when the station began operating from the Cedar Rapids location.[10] When the FCC learned KOCR was broadcasting from an unauthorized facility, and after a $150 payment check to the commission bounced—rendering the station without a license as the construction permit expired—it ordered KOCR off the air on March 25, 1988. The commission granted verbal approval on April 22 for the station to resume;[11] the next year, the FCC levied a $20,000 fine against Metro Program Network for the construction of KOCR at the then-unauthorized location.[12]
Within two weeks of being ordered off the air, Metro Program Network's financial problems began to become apparent. On April 8, while the station was off the air, Fitzgerald paid nearly $5,000 to settle a mechanic's lien on the property brought by a Cedar Rapids drywall firm; this nullified a public auction of the Boyson Road studio.[13] In June, programming distributor Paramount Pictures sued Metro Program Network in federal court, alleging that the station violated copyright laws by playing series such as Happy Days and Mork and Mindy despite not paying the company.[14] Paramount then amended its suit to seek more than $217,000 in damages.[15] The case went to trial in November 1990; in April 1991, a federal judge ordered KOCR and Fitzgerald to pay more than $250,000 to Paramount in his ruling on the 1988 lawsuit, finding that the contract with the syndicator carried no pro rata provisions.[16] Similar lawsuits by Orion Pictures and MTM Enterprises were settled out of court.[17]
The decision to build a smaller tower in Cedar Rapids also had the consequence of limiting the station's over-the-air coverage outside of the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City area. This left Waterloo, located within the market, completely out of Fox broadcast coverage; the city's main cable provider TCI carried Foxnet instead of KOCR since it could not reliably receive the station's signal.[20] KOCR leased a translator in Dubuque for four and a half months in 1991 before it was turned off because the owner was not being paid.[21] When Fox outbid CBS for the rights to broadcast National Football League games beginning in 1994, viewers expressed concern about the lack of a local Fox signal to cable companies serving Waterloo and smaller communities in Eastern Iowa.[22] Unable to broadcast to the entire region, KOCR permitted KGAN, the CBS affiliate based in Cedar Rapids, to negotiate with the Fox network to carry the NFL on Fox; this was intended as a stopgap measure until the station could finalize construction of a taller tower with better signal coverage (a process started in April) in time for the 1995 season.[23]
In addition to the lawsuits in court, KOCR faced the threat of eviction beginning in 1991. Under a capital crunch in 1989, Fitzgerald sold KOCR's facilities to two landlords, Don Tauke and Joan Nickol, who then leased the property back to the station. Tauke and Nickol received court approval to evict KOCR in June 1991, having sought court action against Fitzgerald for some time prior due to lapsed payments, but reached an eleventh-hour agreement because Fitzgerald provided evidence of activity with potential buyers.[24] Tauke and Nickol carried out an attempt to evict the station on September 7, 1994, which was stopped an hour after it began by a court order. While Linn County sheriff's deputies who had fretted about how to explain the loss of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Beverly Hills, 90210 to their children were relieved, station officials were forced to take equipment back inside after work crews had already removed it.[25] Days later, electricity to the studios was cut off, though the station continued to broadcast using generators for power, annoying nearby residents.[26] After Fitzgerald missed payments on a short-term lease that was supposed to run through June 1995, Tauke and Nicol finally lost patience with KOCR. On October 6, they won court approval for another attempt to evict the station, which sheriff's deputies carried out later that day. Cable systems in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City immediately substituted Foxnet for the lost affiliate.[27] At the time of the eviction, the station owed more than $45,000 to
Second Generation ownership and return to air as KFXA
In May 1995, Second Generation of Iowa, a company owned by Thomas Embrescia of Cleveland, acquired KOCR for $1.25 million. Embrescia had previously owned WUPW in Toledo, Ohio, and was also a part-owner of two Cleveland radio stations. An advance of the purchase price allowed Fitzgerald to purchase equipment needed to get the station back on the air, with the remainder of the proceeds satisfying debts. At the time, Eastern Iowa was the largest market in the country without a local Fox affiliate. Fitzgerald conceded that he had been in over his head running the station; he said he did not have the financial wherewithal "to operate the station the way it should be operated".[33] The next month, it was announced that KDUB-TV (channel 40) in Dubuque, an ABC affiliate with local news programming for that city, would switch to Fox in partnership with channel 28, though the Dubuque station would continue to be separately owned.[34]
On August 13, 1995, the station began broadcasting again as KFXA, with the Dubuque station becoming KFXB-TV.[35] With channel 28 back in service, KGAN ultimately withdrew its claim to be able to broadcast NFL games in 1995.
Loss of Fox affiliation
On January 1, 2021, Sinclair quietly sent a letter to cable and satellite providers saying that it had consolidated the Fox affiliations of stations in five markets where it had been on a station operated via an LMA onto Sinclair-owned stations, putting those affiliations directly in Sinclair's control. KFXA was one of the affected stations.[53] On that day, KFXA's Fox affiliation, "Fox 28" branding and syndicated programming moved to the second subchannel of KGAN. On-air operations mostly continued unchanged, though over-the-air viewers were asked to rescan their sets in order to continue watching Fox.[54] On July 28, the FCC issued a forfeiture order stemming from a lawsuit against Second Generation of Iowa. The lawsuit, filed by AT&T, alleged that Second Generation failed to negotiate for retransmission consent in good faith for KFXA. Owners of other Sinclair-managed stations, such as Deerfield Media, were also named in the lawsuit. Second Generation was ordered to pay a fine of $512,228.[55] The station then switched to Dabl.
Second Generation of Iowa filed on May 8, 2025, to sell KFXA to Sinclair for $19 million per an asset purchase agreement agreed in 2008. KFXA does not rank in the top four stations in the market.
