EDITORIAL: “Get Ready for a Tucson Network TV Shakeup!”
Byron Allen today made a $14 billion offer to buy the ailing Paramount Global conglomerate. If he does this, prepare yourselves. Tucson is in for something it’s never had before: a change in network affiliation between stations.
For decades, the market, which never made it into the top 50 Nielsen DMAs (as far as I know) was sizable enough that it could fit in five plausible VHF stations (augmented later by a number of mostly Spanish-speaking UHF stations and, of course, cable).
The five VHFs in Tucson were:
( 4 ) KVOA, the NBC stronghold that went through multiple owners over the years
( 6 ) KUAT, the PBS station
( 9 ) KGUN 9, the ABC affiliate that proclaims itself to be “on your side”
(11) KMSB (formerly KZAZ), the Nogales-licensed independent that became one of America’s first-ever Fox stations back in 1986 and remains that way to this day.
(13) The Old Pueblo’s long-time CBS affiliate KOLD (which at one point was owned by Gene Autry — yes, one of Republic Pictures’ old, reliable singing cowboys used to own our CBS station. He’s far from the only celebrity to have had ownership stakes in local stations here, though.)
But Byron Allen’s $14 billion bid for Paramount Global might do something more than potentially flip over affiliates. It might also give our city another first: a network O&O. Byron Allen has owned KVOA, the NBC station here, since 2021, and if the offer goes through and he ends up buying Paramount Global, KVOA would then (most likely) become an O&O of CBS. Ours will, then, likely be the smallest market with an English-language network O&O, or up there with the smallest markets that had English-language network O&Os.
That may lead into a war as to who will then pick up NBC. It’s anybody’s guess from there; one of the three other commercial VHFs here might take it. So could KWBA, channel 58, or possibly KTTU, channel 18. If it goes to KTTU, that might give that station something resembling an actual network to air in almost seventeen years (MyNetworkTV stopped qualifying as much of anything except an off-network rerun dumping ground by 2011, and the station is one of the very few MNTV affiliates left in the country to still brand itself as one on-air). In the event that the network gets dropped by channel 4 (and it very likely will be if Byron Allen’s attempted acquisition of Paramount Global is completed), I’m not sure if the Spanish-language stations around here are interested in picking up the NBC affiliation from KVOA, particularly due to NBC’s ownership of Telemundo, which owns and operates channel 40, KHRR.
In any event, our market just became a bit more exciting to watch as a result of Byron Allen’s bid for Paramount Global, and we shall see what comes of it, and what effect it could have on our local stations (I imagine the impact it could have on those would be massive).
