KATV

The station first signed on the air on December 19, 1953. Originally licensed to Pine Bluff, the station was a CBS affiliate with a secondary ABC affiliation.[3] It became a full ABC affiliate in 1955 after KTHV (channel 11) signed on and took the CBS affiliation due to KTHS (now KAAY) having a long time relation with CBS Radio; during the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.[4] KATV was founded by John Toole "J.T." Griffin and James C. "Jimmy" Leake (who also founded sister station KTUL in Tulsa and original sister station KWTV in Oklahoma City, the company founded by the former of the two founders would later become the present-day Griffin Communications).

KATV's original logo from 1953.

KATV is Little Rock's oldest continually operating television station, beating NBC affiliate KARK-TV (channel 4) by almost five months. On-air personalities at KATV during its early years of operation included the station's first announcer, Don Curran; the first news director, Bill Hadley; and news announcer, Oscar Alagood. News cameramen included Bob Donaldson and Lou Oberste. Donaldson would later lead the film department at the University of Arkansas Medical School for many years, and Oberste would work at the Arkansas Department of Tourism. Less than a year after its debut, KATV moved its operations from Pine Bluff to studio facilities located on North Beech Street, near Kavanaugh in the Pulaski Heights section of Little Rock that were formerly occupied by KRTV, a failed UHF station that had been the first television station to sign on in the state of Arkansas. The studios were damaged in a fire that occurred on October 31, 1957.

KATV subsequently moved to a two-story building at 310 West 3rd Street; the first floor had been occupied by a furniture store, while the second floor served as studio facilities for a local radio station and also housed the offices of an insurance agency. The television station called the building home for about seven years; during this period, in 1959, Robert Doubleday became one of the youngest television station managers in the country at the age of 26. Under Doubleday, KATV became a major competitor in the Little Rock market. (Doubleday remained as KATV's manager until 1968, when he was promoted to president of KATV and KTUL. Doubleday was replaced in his former position by general sales manager Thomas Goodgame, who would later move to Tulsa as general manager and would eventually become president of Westinghouse Broadcasting.)

The fact that KATV now operated out of Little Rock instead of city of license Pine Bluff led to a major fight in federal court with the Federal Communications Commission and Pine Bluff area citizens, the station lost; until recently, KATV had maintained a major presence in Jefferson County. KATV originally transmitted its signal from a tower near Jefferson, until a taller tower was built farther north in Redfield in 1965.

KATV logo, used from 1990 to 1992.

In November 1963, the Griffin-Leake interests reached an agreement to buy out the respective 25% interests in KWTV held by former Oklahoma Governor Roy J. Turner and Luther Dulaney – which had expanded their interest in the Oklahoma City station in August 1962, after RKO General sold its stake in KWTV to address ownership issues related to RKO's multi-layered purchase-swap transaction involving WRC-TV and WRC-AM-FM (now WTEM and WKYS) in Washington, D.C., WNAC-TV (now defunct; former channel allocation now occupied by WHDH), WNAC-AM (now WRKO) and WRKO-FM (now WBZ-FM) in Boston, the WRCV television and radio stations (now KYW-TV and KYW [AM]) in Philadelphia, and the Washington-based WGMS radio stations (now WWRC and WTOP-FM) – for an initial payment of $200,000 and title rights to the equipment used by KWTV, KTUL and KATV. Turner and Dulaney would then sell the equipment, valued at $2.3 million, to First National Bank of Oklahoma City executives C.A. Voss and James Kite for $3 million. In turn, the three Griffin-Leake stations would be folded into a single corporate umbrella under KATV parent licensee KATV Inc. (subsequently rechristened as Griffin-Leake TV), which would enter into a ten-year equipment leasing agreement with Voss and Kite for a total of $4.5 million (or $37,500 per month). Griffin and the Leakes would own approximately all of the common voting stock and collectively own 84% of nonvoting common shares in KATV Inc. post-merger, with 10% of the remaining nonvoting interest held by Edgar Bell (who would remain executive vice president and general manager at KWTV).[5][6][7][8][9][10]

KATV has used the Circle 7 logo since 1965, a logo that had traditionally been associated at the time with ABC owned-and-operated stations, and was one of the network's first affiliates to have used the logo (as designed by G. Dean Smith in 1962). KATV's use of the Circle 7 logo predates even the variant Circle 7 used by Allbritton flagship station WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. from 1977 until it switched to the standard version in 2001. However, unlike WJLA and most of the O&Os, prior to the Sinclair purchase KATV paired the ABC logo with the Circle 7 sparingly, usually in on-screen logo bugs in which the Circle 7 covers the standard ABC bug. KATV also first placed the Circle 7 inside a square in the 1990s; WJLA now uses this version as well, though neither station uses it consistently (KATV stopped placing the Circle 7 logo inside the square in September 2008). The station moved its operations to the Worthen Bank Building in downtown Little Rock in October 1970, after Worthen vacated the building and moved into a newly constructed building in the downtown district.

In April 1969, Griffin-Leake TV announced that it would break up its holdings into two separate companies. Leake – who had moved from being a 3.5% minority partner in KATV to half-owner as a result of the earlier investor divestitures – retained ownership of KATV, KTUL, Ponca City, Oklahoma-based cable television operator Cable TV Co. and a controlling 80% interest in the construction permit for Fajardo, Puerto Rico television station WSTE (now WORO-DT), while Griffin retained ownership of KWTV under the licensee Century Communications Co. (Griffin's company would eventually return to Arkansas in September 1985, when it purchased NBC affiliate KPOM-TV [now Fox affiliate KFTA-TV] in Fort Smith from the Ozark Broadcasting Company; Griffin would sell KPOM and the Rogers-based satellite station it signed on in October 1989, KFAA-TV [now KNWA-TV], to the Nexstar Broadcasting Group – owner of KATV rival KARK-TV – in September 2003.)[11][12][13][14]

KATV logo, used from 1999 to 2005.

On November 3, 1982, Leake Industries sold KATV and KTUL to Washington, D.C.-based Allbritton Communications in an all-cash transaction for $80 million; the sale received FCC approval on February 14, 1983.[15][16][17][18][19][20]

In February 1999, KATV aired commercials for the Walt Disney Pictures animated film Doug's 1st Movie during an ABC network broadcast of Disney's Doug. Nearly eight years later, in 2007, the FCC levied a $8,000 fine against KATV for violating the "host-selling" provision in the Children's Television Act that classifies the broadcast of a commercial that features characters from a children's program being televised (thus classified as the 'hosts') as a program-length commercial. KATV appealed the fine, claiming the error was due to a last-minute insertion order from ABC. However, it lost the appeal in April 2010.[21]

KATV's former transmitter tower in Redfield, used until its collapse on January 11, 2008.

The station's transmitter tower in Redfield collapsed on January 11, 2008, while workers were adjusting guy wires[22] (the tower was also used by the Arkansas Educational Television Network for the analog signal of flagship station KETS (channel 2), whose analog signal remained off-air until June 13, 2008, when a temporary analog antenna was installed at the Clear Channel Broadcasting Tower Redfield, where its digital transmitter had already originated). KATV's analog signal remained off the air for two weeks, until it built temporary transmitter facilities from an auxiliary tower on Shinall Mountain used by CBS affiliate KTHV. Now-defunct Little Rock-based Equity Media Holdings initially helped restore KATV's signal to area cable and satellite providers[22] by relaying its digital signal over the third digital subchannel of KWBF (channel 42, now KARZ-TV and owned by Nexstar Media Group) – originally as digital channel 42.3 in standard definition, later remapped as digital channel 7.1 and upgraded to high definition.

KATV's analog signal remained on Comcast in the Little Rock area after the collapse as it received the station through a direct feed from KATV's Main Street studios, although the HD feed was initially interrupted; Comcast also delivered KATV's signal to other cable and satellite providers.[23] KATV eventually received FCC approval to build a new tower on Shinall Mountain, where Little Rock's other major network affiliates (and both of KATV's present backup signals) are located.[24] The license for the station's analog signal continued to reference the Redfield tower as its transmitter site while the station was broadcasting in analog from the temporary site on Shinall Mountain, as well as in digital over a subchannel of KWBF. KATV began transmitting its digital signal from the new facility located on Shinall Mountain on February 1, 2009.

KATV's studio on Fourth Street in Little Rock.

On July 29, 2013, Allbritton announced that it would sell its seven television stations, including KATV, to the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group for $985 million, in order to concentrate the company's operations exclusively around its political news website, Politico.[25][26][27][28] The sale's regulatory process was held up for nearly a year, however, as Sinclair attempted to address ownership issues involving stations it already operated in three markets (WTTO/WDBB and WABM in Birmingham, Alabama, WMMP in Charleston, South Carolina, and WHP-TV and WLYH-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) and Albritton-owned stations that placed Sinclair in conflict with FCC regulations on local station ownership (WBMA/WCFT/WJSU, WCIV and WHTM, respectively), specifically with regard to LMAs that were grandfathered following a 1999 ruling by the Commission that such agreements made after November 5, 1996 covering the programming of more than 15% of a station's broadcast day would count toward the ownership limits for the brokering station's parent licensee. (A sale of any of the affected Allbritton properties to a separate buyer was not an option for Sinclair, as Allbritton wanted its stations to be sold together to limit the tax rate that the company would have had to pay from the accrued proceeds, which it estimated would have been substantially higher if the group was sold piecemeal; Sinclair sold most of the conflict outlets to Howard Stirk Holdings on the pretense that it would forego entering into operational agreements with Sinclair.)[29][30][31][32][33]

After nearly a year of delays, Sinclair's deal to acquire Allbritton was approved by the FCC on July 24, 2014, and was completed on August 1, 2014.[34][35][36][37] As result of the Allbritton purchase, KATV gained new sister stations in nearby markets: fellow ABC affiliate KDNL-TV in St. Louis, CBS affiliate KRCG in Columbia–Jefferson City, Missouri; Fox affiliate WZTV, CW affiliate WNAB and their MyNetworkTV-affiliated LMA partner WUXP-TV in Nashville, Tennessee; and Fox affiliate KBSI and its MyNetworkTV-affiliated LMA partner WDKA in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

In 2009, KATV donated approximately 300 hours of film and 26,000 hours of video tape to the University of Arkansas David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. For nearly eight years, the donated footage remained untouched until the Tyson family donated $1.5 million to the Pryor Center to digitize the footage. As of August 2019, the first digitized images are available on the Pryor Center's website.[38][39]

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

In 2005, KATV launched KATV News Now, a 24-hour news and weather channel which aired rebroadcasts and simulcasts of KATV's news programming; it competed directly with KTHV's similar "THV2" service. Until the collapse of KATV's Redfield tower, KATV News Now was carried on digital subchannel 7.2; the service continues to be available for streaming on the station's website, having remained online even after the tower collapse, and has since been restored on Comcast's digital cable service in Little Rock.

KATV later launched a 24-hour weather channel called "AccuWeather 24/7" on digital subchannel 7.3 in 2010, which was affiliated with The Local AccuWeather Channel. On August 23, 2011, the Disney-ABC Television Group announced an affiliation agreement with KATV to carry the lifestyle-oriented digital broadcast network Live Well Network; the network replaced AccuWeather 24/7 on digital subchannel 7.3.[40] In turn, male-oriented Grit took its place in late 2014/early 2015.

The station's 7.2 subchannel began carrying sporting events from American Sports Network with its first broadcast on August 30, 2014.[41]

KATV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 7, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 22.[42] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 7.

• Paul Eells – sports director and "Voice of the Razorbacks" (1978–2006; died on July 31, 2006, likely due to injuries sustained from an automobile accident on Interstate 40 near Russellville)
• Kristin Fisher – reporter, now at Fox News Channel
• Greg Hurst – anchor/reporter (later at WABC, KHOU; now at WREG)
• Missy Irvin – former news editor; current Republican member of the Arkansas State Senate[50]
• Rob Johnson (news anchor) – (later at WBBM-TV)
• Julie Mayberry – co-host of Daybreak morning news show; Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives since 2015 from Pulaski and Saline counties
• Anne Pressly – news anchor/reporter (died in October 2008 of injuries sustained from an attack by an intruder in her Little Rock home; the killer was caught and sentenced to life in prison without parole)
• Susan Roesgen – anchor/reporter (1990s–2000s, now at WGNO)
• David Shuster – reporter (1994–1996)
• Nancy Snyderman – medical reporter (1984)
• Kate Sullivan – anchor/reporter (2000–2006)