KDBC-TV (channel 4) is a television station in El Paso, Texas, United States, affiliated with CBS and MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Fox affiliate KFOX-TV (channel 14). The two stations share studios on South Alto Mesa Drive in northwest El Paso; KDBC-TV's transmitter is located atop the Franklin Mountains on the El Paso city limits.
KDBC-TV is El Paso's first and oldest television station. It began broadcasting as KROD-TV, owned alongside KROD radio and the El Paso Times newspaper, on December 18, 1952. In its early years, it aired programming from CBS, ABC, and the DuMont Television Network. Under owners including Trigg–Vaughn and Doubleday Broadcasting, the station produced a variety of local programming including an El Paso version of Bozo the Clown. When Doubleday sold KROD radio in 1973, channel 4 became KDBC-TV. Under the ownership of Portal Communications, a division of the Evening Post Publishing Company, KDBC was the number-one news station in El Paso.
Portal sold KDBC in 1985 to United Broadcasting, under whose ownership the market became more competitive. KDBC slipped into a distant third-place position during the 15-year ownership tenure of the Imes family. In this period, the station experienced frequent personnel turnover and was held back by corporate management that failed to connect with the needs of El Paso viewers. In 2000, Imes attempted to sell the station to Pappas Telecasting. Though Pappas's initial proposal to acquire the station and switch it to Spanish-language broadcasting failed to materialize, Pappas successfully bought KDBC-TV in 2003.
The ailing KDBC-TV ceased being a standalone entity in October 2009, when Titan TV Broadcast Group—an entity backed by Pappas's creditors in bankruptcy—outsourced many operations and services to competitor KTSM-TV. The stations shared resources including a newsroom. The arrangement was unwound when Sinclair concurrently acquired KDBC-TV and KFOX-TV in 2013. The two stations were integrated at their current location and KDBC reinforced with an expanded local news offering. In 2024, cutbacks at Sinclair reduced the station's news presence considerably.
History Early years El Paso radio station KROD (600 AM), owned by the Roderick Broadcasting Company, was the third group to apply for a television station in El Paso, Texas. It applied for channel 4 in November 1950, amid a freeze on new station applications imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). KROD refiled in June 1952, after the freeze was lifted, and was granted the first construction permit for an El Paso station on July 31. Plans immediately were put into motion to build the station's studios, adjoining KROD radio on Wyoming Avenue, and a transmitter facility atop the Franklin Mountains, including a switchback road to the mountaintop site and a transmitter building made of the stone dislodged during blasting operations. The transmitter had been on order for a year and a half.
KROD-TV broadcast the first test pattern in El Paso on December 4, 1952, and regular programming began on December 14. It aired programs from CBS and the DuMont Television Network. The original signal broadcast on a temporary antenna before the mountaintop facility went into use nine days later. KROD-TV was the only television station in El Paso until KTSM-TV (channel 9) debuted on January 4, 1953, initially as an NBC and ABC affiliate. KROD-TV joined ABC as an affiliate in May 1953. DuMont ceased its existence as a network in 1955, and ABC programs moved to the new KILT (channel 13) in November 1956. That year, the station signed to become an affiliate of the NTA Film Network, a film distribution service.
The Roderick Broadcasting Company was merged with the El Paso Times newspaper, which Dorrance Roderick published, in 1953. Six years later, the KROD stations were sold for $3.45 million to Cecil Trigg and Jack Vaughn, the owners of KOSA-TV in Odessa and KVII-TV in Amarillo. Trigg-Vaughn sold its stations to the book publishing firm Doubleday and Company in a deal announced in October 1966 and completed in February 1967. The transaction marked Doubleday's expansion into broadcasting and created the Doubleday Broadcasting Co. subsidiary. Doubleday opted to sell KROD radio in 1972 and intended that the radio station keep the call sign. This necessitated a change for channel 4, which became KDBC-TV on May 29, 1973, in conjunction with the radio sale.
In its early years, KDBC produced a range of local programming. Martin Haines started at KROD-TV as a cartoon show host before becoming the station's news anchor between 1958 and 1974. The actress Lois Kibbee was a show host before leaving for New York to pursue her career. From 1968 into the 1970s, channel 4 had a local version of the franchised children's series Bozo the Clown. In El Paso, Bozo was Howell Eurich, who had previously served as a booth announcer and in other children's hosting roles. Eurich, who doubled as KROD-TV's promotions manager, also trained Bozos for other cities.
KDBC-TV: Evening Post and United ownership Shortly after selling KROD radio, Doubleday agreed to sell KDBC-TV to Portal Communications—a subsidiary of the Evening Post Publishing Company of Charleston, South Carolina—in a transaction announced in November 1973 and completed in 1974. Under Portal, the news department became an increased focus. Roy Ortega, who worked at KDBC at the time, attributed KDBC with spurring improvements in newscasting in the market in the 1970s. Between 1975 to 1979, KDBC increased its news staff from 8 people to 20 and took the ratings lead from KTSM-TV, which had been until that time the news leader in El Paso. The news staff further grew to 30 people by 1982.
In later years, Eurich served as KDBC's weatherman, alongside his fourth wife, Gail Gordon, and a Lhasa Apso dog known as Puffy Little Cloud. The dog, who wore different costumes reflective of the weather, became a local celebrity and was featured in Texas Monthly magazine and the National Enquirer. Eurich and Gordon departed the station in 1981 in search of television work in other cities; he briefly returned to El Paso to work at KCIK-TV (channel 14) but, overcome by grief for his wife's deteriorating condition, committed suicide on November 3, 1982. His son Robin later became associated with the Chicago version of Bozo the Clown on WGN-TV.
During Portal's ownership, KDBC remained the El Paso news leader, attracting a third of the 6 and 10 p.m. audience to its local newscasts in February 1984. That year, the original tower was replaced by a new mast further north on Comanche Peak to broadcast KDBC and a new Spanish-language station, KINT-TV (channel 26).
After spinning out KDBC into a separate company, El Paso Broadcasting Company, Evening Post put the station on the market in August 1985 and agreed on a sale to United Broadcasting of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1986. United agreed to sell its stations to ML Media in October 1987, only for the Black Monday stock market crash to cause ML's owner Merrill Lynch to sour on the idea of selling partnership units in the stations, leading to the deal's cancellation after two weeks.
During United's ownership, KDBC faced renewed competition in the El Paso news ratings. By 1985, KVIA-TV (channel 7, the former channel 13) and KTSM-TV were regularly battling KDBC for top news ratings at 6 and 10 p.m. For the next several years, all three stations were in close competition to lead in the news slots.
The Imes era After the collapse of the ML Media deal, KDBC-TV was sold in 1988 to the Commercial Dispatch Publishing Company, owned by the Imes family of Columbus, Mississippi, for $33 million. KDBC became the company's largest station.
During Imes's ownership, KDBC-TV fell from competing for first place to being a distant third in news. In 1990 and 1991, the station was second behind KVIA. By 1993, it was in third place at 10 p.m. and tied for fourth or narrowly in fifth place, depending on the survey, with KINT at 6 p.m. During this time, the station experienced multiple and regular changes in leadership as well as budget cuts. From October 1990 to July 1991, KDBC laid off 13 employees, ending in the firing of general manager Gary Sotir. He was replaced by Stan Siegal, who also served as vice president of the Imes TV station group. In 1993, KDBC news anchor Estela Casas left after eight years to take the same position at the more popular KVIA.
In 1995, the Fox network made a heavy pitch in hopes of wooing KDBC-TV to switch affiliations from CBS and thereby upgrading from KFOX-TV, a UHF station, to a VHF station with an existing news department. Fox executives offered to buy a minority stake in the station from Imes if it changed affiliation. The network had recently won the rights to NFL football including the Dallas Cowboys and had programs with Hispanic appeal on its schedule. Instead, Imes renewed with CBS in exchange for compensation Variety Joe Flint called "very high" for a market the size of El Paso. Siegal retired that year and was replaced by Jim Grimes, who had been the general manager of WIFR-TV in Rockford, Illinois. The station was relaunched under Grimes with a new news format and logo, to no avail in increasing viewership. Grimes was fired in March 1996.
The revolving door of management and news formats continued. The station hired new general managers in June 1996 and February 1997 with the hiring of former KTSM executive Dan Krieger. The state of the station was such that Frank Imes, the president of Imes Communications, was forced to spend more time in El Paso than usual. Several KTSM employees followed Krieger to KDBC, including anchor Raymond Mesa, and the station relaunched its newscasts as Channel 4 News that April. Later that year, former KVIA anchor Suzanne Michaels joined KDBC as the lead female co-anchor, and the station debuted a morning newscast and rebranded again as Action 4 News. The changes were not sufficient to lift KDBC out of third. In 2000, the station tried another new strategy by consolidating its two early evening newscasts at 5 and 6 p.m. into a single half-hour report at 5:30 p.m., moving the CBS Evening News to 5 p.m.
El Paso observers attributed the station's decline under Imes to a lack of understanding of the local community and viewership habits. El Paso Herald-Post columnist Charlie Edgren noted that Imes had a tendency to bring in "Back Easters" from Midwestern and Eastern markets who lacked the knowledge of El Paso that KVIA and KTSM had in upper management and staff. Former KDBC anchor Bill Mitchell, interviewed in 2012, noted that some of the changes introduced at KDBC were not accepted by viewers. Roy Ortega, another longtime El Paso broadcaster, noted, "What happened with Channel 4 is that you ended up having ownership from outside the city that came in and didn't have a good understanding of the community's diversity and demographics. ... They came in with the sole purpose of making money, not serving the community."
2000 Pappas sale attempt As early as 1998, rumors were circulating that Imes was interested in selling KDBC-TV. In March 2000, the company announced it had agreed to sell the station to Pappas Telecasting.
On September 8, 2000, Pappas announced it was forming a joint venture with Mexican broadcaster TV Azteca to launch Azteca América, a new Spanish-language TV network, and that KDBC-TV would be its new El Paso affiliate beginning in April 2001. Consequently, CBS would need to find a new El Paso affiliate, with KKWB-TV (channel 65) cited as a possible new home for the network by KDBC-TV's general manager. The deal left national advertisers reticent to buy time on KDBC-TV because they were unsure of the station's future plans.