KVOA

In September 1953, KVOA signed on as Tucson's second television station and NBC affiliate, eight months after KOLD-TV (channel 13) signed on as the CBS affiliate. Although KVOA was an NBC affiliate, it carried a secondary affiliation with ABC until 1956 when KDWI-TV (channel 9, now KGUN-TV) began operations. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.[3]

It was originally owned by Chicago advertising executive John Louis, Sr., along with KVOA-AM 1290 (now KCUB). It was a sister station to KTAR in Phoenix. In October 1953, KVOA brought Tucson its first-ever live television event: a World Series broadcast.[4] The Louis broadcasting empire eventually became known as Pacific & Southern Broadcasting, headquartered in Phoenix; however, Louis did not keep KVOA for long. In 1955, Louis sold the KVOA stations to Clinton D. McKinnon, who would later acquire KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and combine the two television stations to form Alvarado Television. In 1962, the Alvarado stations were sold to Steinman Stations, the owner of WGAL-TV in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

In 1968, the Steinmans sold a controlling stake in KVOA-TV to Pulitzer Publishing, making it Pulitzer's first (partial) television station acquisition outside of its home base in St. Louis, Missouri; KOAT went to Pulitzer fully a year later. In 1972, Pulitzer was forced to spin off its share of KVOA to an employee group called Channel 4-TV after it purchased the Arizona Daily Star the year before due to the tightening of the Federal Communications Commission's cross-ownership rules. Channel 4-TV also acquired Steinman's stake in KVOA around the same time.

The station was acquired by the Hobby family of Houston, publishers of the Houston Post, in 1982. When the Post was sold a year later, the Hobby family reorganized its broadcasting interests as H&C Communications. H&C sold off its television stations in 1993, with KVOA going to the Evening Post Publishing Company (through its Cordillera Communications subsidiary).

On October 29, 2018, Cordillera announced the sale of its entire station group to the E. W. Scripps Company. Scripps could not acquire KVOA, since it already owns KGUN and CW affiliate KWBA; as a result, KVOA was sold to Quincy Media in a secondary deal for $70 million.[5][6][7] The transaction was approved by the FCC on April 5, 2019,[8] and was completed on May 1 of that year.[9]

On February 1, 2021, less than two years after KVOA was acquired by Quincy, Gray Television announced it had purchased Quincy Media for $925 million. The deal is expected to be completed later in 2021. As Gray already owns the market's KOLD-TV and both stations rank among the top four in ratings in the Tucson market, it intends to keep that station and sell KVOA in order to satisfy FCC requirements.[10]

Long known as Tucson's NBC affiliate, KVOA currently clears that network's entire lineup. Syndicated programming on KVOA includes: Inside Edition, The Dr. Oz Show, Rachael Ray and Dr. Phil.

KVOA began airing NBC's long-running Tonight Show sometime in 1960 or 1961;[14] for the remainder of Jack Paar's tenure on the show and for the first few years of Johnny Carson's tenure on the show, KVOA only joined the show's East Coast feed for 45 minutes, thus, for the latter, the station did not air his monologue and pre-interview sketches[15][16] until the station expanded its late-night newscast to 30 minutes during the 1970–71 season and established a satellite link with NBC's Phoenix affiliate KTAR-TV (now KPNX).[17] KVOA appeared to have shown The Tonight Show in its entirety by 1975 and is still doing so today.[18][19]

Starting in the 1982–83 season, KVOA delayed Late Night with David Letterman to 12:00 midnight (later 12:05 a.m.) in order to carry programs ranging from Entertainment Tonight[20] to the original version of the game show Love Connection.[21] During the early part of the era in which comedian Conan O'Brien hosted the talk show, KVOA also bumped it by half an hour in order to carry the TV extension of Rush Limbaugh's radio program,[22] Access Hollywood,[23] and same-day reruns of Extra.[24] On September 2, 2002, KVOA began clearing O'Brien's program at the network-designated 11:35 p.m. time slot for Mountain Time Zone affiliates, and moved the same-day Extra rerun to 1:35 a.m.[25]

During Super Bowl XLIII in 2009, Comcast's standard-definition transmission of the station was interrupted for approximately 20 seconds replacing KVOA's broadcast of the game with hard-core porn, affecting Comcast's analog subscribers in portions of the Tucson area; it allowed KVOA to join Chicago stations WGN-TV and WTTW and the cable channel HBO (all of which had similar incidents) as victims of broadcast signal intervention.[26] (WGN's former superstation feed was and remains available on much of Tucson's cable systems; as such, WGN was Tucson's de facto WB affiliate until KWBA (channel 58) signed on in 1999.)[27][28][29][30] The substitution appears to have been made at Comcast, not at KVOA, leaving KVOA's over-the-air, satellite and other cable providers viewers unaffected. Also, Comcast's high-definition transmission of KVOA was not affected.[31]

In May 2011, KVOA announced that it would delay the showing of an upcoming episode of Law & Order: Los Angeles based on the mass shootings which occurred in Tucson earlier that year with a late-night airing, due to concerns that its content would be too sensitive.[32] To date, it has been the station's last known preemption of any NBC program for any reason other than for breaking news or severe weather coverage.

KVOA formerly operated Southern Arizona News Network, a 24-hour cable news television network that was exclusive to local Cox Cable subscribers, that premiered on June 7, 2007, and ended broadcasting on March 31, 2010.

From the early 1970s to 2006, KVOA had used the Eyewitness News moniker, and later used the slogan "Where The News Comes First". These newscasts first used a variation of Lalo Schifrin's "Tar Sequence" from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, and then later used the various "News Series" themes composed by Frank Gari. These themes were all usually associated with local newscasts on ABC stations, not those of KVOA's affiliated network of NBC, which was more than satisfied with KVOA's news ratings; those in particular had made it one of NBC's strongest affiliates in the Southwest. Just as NBC became the nation's overall leader during the 1980s and 1990s, KVOA also was the market's news leader: by 1995, Channel 4 had led the Tucson news ratings for 21 straight years, half of its history[33] – but only after Jon F. Ruby became the station's general manager in 1974 and initiated a major expansion of news. In 1995, KVOA's $750,000 satellite truck was the market's only microwave-based live news vehicle; Eyewitness News equaled or beat KGUN and KOLD combined in all time slots; was first with stereo, closed captioning, and microwave electronic news gathering; and had the largest television news staff in the market (second in size only to the Arizona Daily Star). However, in February 2006 the name of the station's newscasts was changed to News 4, with the new slogan "Coverage You Can Count On". In November 2007, KVOA changed its slogan to "Balanced News You Can Count On", and also began using normal NBC station themes.

On April 22, 2007, KVOA became the first station in Tucson to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition, starting with the 10 p.m. newscast; among the changes included a new set and updated graphics. KVOA is the first station in Tucson to offer news in high definition and the second in Arizona (following KPNX in Phoenix).

• K04QP-D,[36] channel 4, Casas Adobes, Arizona (serving the northwest part of the Tucson metropolitan area shielded by Mount Lemmon).[37]
• K28OY-D,http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?call=K28OY-D channel 28, Sierra Vista, Arizona.

• Official website
• KVOA in the FCC's TV station database
• Query TV Fool's coverage map for KVOA
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on KVOA-TV