Channel 6 relocates to Shreveport
On September 23, 1959, the FCC granted Camden News Publishing approval to construct a new transmitter tower for KCMC-TV at a site 2.3 mi south-southwest of Vivian, Louisiana (approximately 46 mi due south of the original transmitter site), opting to waive regulations that required a broadcast station's transmitter site be located no more than 15 mi from its city of license (in this case, Texarkana, which is 72.3 mi north-northwest of Shreveport).[13][14]
CBS grew frustrated with having to maintain affiliations with two stations to carry its programming in an otherwise effectively consolidated market. In December 1960, CBS announced that it would disaffiliate from KCMC-TV and assume a full-time affiliation with Shreveport-based KSLA-TV (channel 12)—which had carried the network's programming since it signed on the air on January 1, 1954—citing that KSLA's signal decently covered Texarkana; with there being enough television stations serving the eastern two-thirds of the Ark-La-Tex region to allow it to maintain an exclusive affiliation, CBS therefore considered KCMC to be redundant. KCMC-TV was faced with the prospect of having to fall back on its secondary affiliation with the then-weak ABC (which would not gain a major foothold in the Nielsen ratings nationally until the latter part of the 1960s) or become an independent station—neither of which was a viable option for such a small market. Hussman thus persuaded the FCC to formally collapse Texarkana and Shreveport into a single television market.
The Vivian broadcast tower—which, at 1580 ft, became the second-tallest transmission tower in the Southern United States at that time—was activated on May 1, 1961. The transmitter allowed the station to extended its signal deeper into parts of northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas that previously could not receive the station either adequately or at all as well as increasing its city-grade coverage deeper into the Shreveport area and extending up to 45 mi to the south of the city. On that date, the station's call letters were changed to KTAL-TV, which served as both a reference to channel 6's three-state service area—Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana—and to its new transmission tower. (The station was also phonetically referred to as "K-Tal" [or "Kay-Tall"] on an alternative basis until the mid-1970s.)[15][16]
In March 1961, NBC reached an agreement with KTAL-TV to become the network's primary affiliate for the enlarged Shreveport–Texarkana market, replacing KTBS-TV (channel 3), which had served as Shreveport's original NBC affiliate since the station launched on September 3, 1955; KTBS's contract with NBC was not scheduled to expire until September 1962, though there had been speculation that KTBS and KTAL would swap primary affiliations before its expiration.[17] On September 3, KTAL took over as the exclusive NBC affiliate for the Shreveport–Texarkana market; KTBS-TV concurrently became the market's exclusive ABC affiliate. Coinciding with the affiliation switch, KTAL-TV moved its primary operations into a new studio facility on Market Street in northeastern Shreveport, retaining its original Summerhill Road studios to primarily serve as a Texarkana news bureau. (FCC regulations had been changed in 1952 to allow for a broadcast station to house their main studio within 50 mi of their city of license.) The FCC subsequently granted a reassignment of the KTAL license and its accompanying VHF channel 6 allocation to Shreveport on October 11, 1961.[17][18][19][20][21]
In 1970, KTAL became one of several commercial stations in markets where the service did not have a member outlet to air the PBS program Sesame Street. To get that program on the air, an advocacy group called Citizens for Sesame Street was formed in the Shreveport–Bossier City area to fundraise to help cover the cost of bringing Sesame Street to local television. After struggling to find a timeslot for the show, having shifted it from 9 a.m. to 3 pm, the local programming rights to Sesame Street were moved to KSLA in February 1972, where it remained until both cable penetration allowed the show to be made available through other PBS member stations within the region and Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB) drafted plans to launch KLTS (channel 24), which launched as a satellite of the state network's Baton Rouge flagship, WLPB-TV, on August 9, 1978.[22]
In 1975, Palmer Newspapers was renamed WEHCO Media, Inc., an abbreviation for the Walter E. Hussman Company. (The company is now run by Hussman's son, Walter E. Hussman, Jr.) In February 1975, in rulings that marked 16 "egregious" television station-print combinations for divestiture under the new law, the FCC ruled that WEHCO could not own both KTAL-TV and the Texarkana Gazette on grounds that the properties violated new cross-ownership rules that prohibited media companies from owning newspapers and full-power broadcast television and radio outlets in the same market, restricting media companies to owning only either a print or broadcast property within an individual market.[23][24]
KCMC Inc. representatives subsequently filed an appeal against the decision, arguing that the rules did not apply with regards to its broadcast-print combination because KTAL's city-grade signal contour did not cover Texarkana and, therefore, that city was not its major market. In preparation for an appeal ruling that did not favor WEHCO, in the summer of 1979, the company attempted to sell KTAL-TV to Dallas-based A. H. Belo Corporation—then-owner of that market's ABC affiliate, WFAA—for a reported offer of $16.6 million. In August 1979, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled that the FCC had misinterpreted its own rules and could not lawfully apply the divestiture requirement to KCMC Inc./Texarkana Newspapers Inc., with regard to KTAL and the Texarkana Gazette.[25][26]
