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KDNL-TV (channel 30) is a television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, affiliated with ABC. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios at the University Tower in the suburb of Richmond Heights and a transmitter in Shrewsbury.
Channel 30 in St. Louis was sought on several occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s, though no station materialized. The fourth attempt to build the channel was originally spearheaded by a group of local investors as well as Washington attorney John Dean; after the construction permit for KDNL-TV was sold to Thomas Mellon Evans, the station began broadcasting on June 8, 1969. It served as the second independent station for the St. Louis area, airing syndicated reruns as well as financial news and sports. Cox Broadcasting purchased KDNL-TV in 1981, in part because it held a permit for over-the-air subscription television broadcasting. Cox launched this service in June 1982, but it was a business failure, and Cox shut it down in February 1983. The station continued to be an overall money-loser and a misfit in the Cox station portfolio, even though it became the first local affiliate of Fox in 1986.
Barry Baker and Larry Marcus, former executives of rival independent KPLR-TV who were fired for trying to buy that station, purchased KDNL-TV from Cox in 1989. It became the first station in a St. Louis-based company eventually known as River City Broadcasting, which soon acquired other independent and Fox-affiliated stations. Ratings and revenue improved with the success of the Fox network, with total viewership approaching KPLR-TV, and led the station to start a local news department in January 1995. Under a deal announced in 1994 but carried out in August 1995, KDNL-TV lost its Fox affiliation and switched with KTVI to become the affiliate of ABC in St. Louis.
In 1996, River City merged into Sinclair Broadcast Group. However, KDNL's news department failed to gain traction, hurt by the traditionally poor ratings for ABC programming in the market; high turnover in news talent; a lack of full-day news service; and the resistance to change of many St. Louis viewers. In 1999, Baker left Sinclair and assigned an option to purchase KDNL-TV and six Sinclair-owned radio stations in St. Louis to Emmis Communications; the option resulted in a lawsuit settled with Sinclair retaining the TV station and selling off the radio properties. More critically, it led to neglect of the station's transmitter facility, causing signal issues, and the suspension of early evening newscasts for the struggling news operation. In the wake of the advertising slump after the September 11 attacks, Sinclair closed the KDNL-TV news department in 2001 and laid off all 47 staff. Since then, the station has largely been the fourth- or fifth-rated station in the market, with two short-lived and outsourced attempts at local news programming since the 2001 newsroom closure.
In September 1956, the Plaza Radio and Television Company of New York applied for channel 30. Plaza also applied for authority to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming using the proposed station. The FCC indicated it would need to hold hearings to determine whether the channel should be awarded, even though no other group was seeking channel 30, because Plaza held but was not using a permit for channel 26 in San Francisco. This application and another for a station in Detroit were dismissed by the FCC in September 1958.
Boyd Fellows, the former general manager of educational station KETC and assistant to the president of Continental, then left that company to become the president of a new firm seeking channel 30, the Greater St. Louis Television Corporation. Other officers included a Black dentist, Dr. Benjamin F. Davis, and a Washington attorney, John Dean; his then-wife, Karla Hennings, was also a stockholder. Dean had participated in the formation of Greater St. Louis Television Corporation in January, while he was still employed by Welch & Morgan; when the firm found out about the work, it dismissed Dean for what Welch called "unethical conduct". Though characterizations of his dismissal varied, one former associate told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was ordered to leave immediately and not given time to pack up his belongings. This story came to light during the Watergate hearings, during which Dean was a crucial witness as to the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, and was first reported by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
The Greater St. Louis Television Corporation received the construction permit for channel 30 on June 7, 1966, and took the call sign KDNL-TV on August 17.
Under Evans, construction activity finally commenced. The former studios of KMOX-TV at 13th and Cole streets were acquired to house channel 30, while the station was approved to build a tower in Shrewsbury, on land that was part of the Kenrick Seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. In April, a mast began rising on the site.
KDNL-TV debuted on June 8, 1969. Its program schedule was dominated by syndicated reruns of former network shows as well as a daytime financial news program, TV 30 Financial Observer. Channel 30 was the first station built by the newly formed Evans Broadcasting Corporation, which had plans to start activating additional stations. KDNL-TV trailed the established independent station in the St. Louis market, KPLR-TV, and had less than half of its audience share as of July 1972.
In 1977, KDNL added coverage of St. Louis Blues hockey road games, which aired through the 1980–81 season; after that, the games moved to KSDK (channel 5).
Evans made one attempt at expanding the reach of KDNL-TV deeper into Illinois. In June 1979, a subsidiary company, Southern Illinois Broadcasting Corporation, was granted the permit to build channel 13 at Mount Vernon, Illinois, for which it had filed two years prior. However, the Evans proposal attracted protests from southern Illinois residents who feared the channel would merely be used to rebroadcast KDNL-TV programming and wanted to see a full-fledged local station for their area. A farmer in Salem, Illinois, went as far as to refuse to lease her land for transmitter site construction when she learned of Evans's plans for channel 13. Though Evans had secured another site and even shipped the tower to Salem to be erected, the FCC responded to the residents' concerns by rescinding the permit grant in November 1979. In February 1980, citing the potential for years of litigation, it withdrew its attempt to build channel 13.
In April 1976, Evans Broadcasting applied for authority to broadcast over-the-air subscription television (STV) programming using KDNL-TV. The application languished because another company, Midwest St. Louis, had filed for channel 24 and proposed the same type of programming, and at the time the FCC only permitted one STV station per market. Despite that, the possibility of reaching the large, then-uncabled St. Louis market with pay TV programming excited interest from buyers in the STV space. Time Inc., which through its American Television and Communications unit had cable and pay TV operations, entered into negotiations to purchase the station from Evans. Evans reached an agreement to sell the station to Buford Television, a Texas company in the process of moving into subscription programming with stations such as WSTR-TV in Cincinnati, in September 1979. With that sale pending, in February 1980, the FCC granted subscription authority to KDNL-TV. Though the FCC granted the Buford deal on April 30, the agreement was withdrawn on May 8.
Preview failed in St. Louis due to poor economic conditions and a lack of sports rights (though seven St. Louis Cardinals baseball games were telecast), in addition to a faster-than-anticipated wiring of the area for cable. In October, the company began aggressively discounting installation fees for new subscribers, causing it to lose money for every subscriber that signed up for Preview. Amid losses estimated at $100,000 a month and with just 10,000 households signed up, Cox announced in December 1982 that it would cease subscription television service on February 28, 1983. The Preview operation also hurt the station's ability to sell commercial advertising; advertisers were put off by the lost ad inventory and adult programming. Michael S. Kievman told a panel at the 1983 conference of the Association of Independent Television Stations (INTV) that he had received comments like "No one watches you, you're not really a TV station."
Emerging from Preview, Cox invested $2 million in updating the station's facilities. Blues hockey returned to the station, though it moved to KPLR-TV in 1986. KDNL-TV became a charter affiliate of Fox at its launch in October 1986. However, at the outset, Fox programming was little help for the station, which in May 1987 was tying KETC in the critical early evening period and was being beaten by KPLR by a factor of six-to-one. The network's flagging The Late Show with Joan Rivers was pulled from KDNL-TV's schedule two months before its cancellation.
For Barry and Marcus, the purchase of KDNL-TV was the first act in the construction of a broadcasting group. In May 1989, a deal was struck to acquire KABB, an independent station in San Antonio, Texas, under the name River City Television Partners, which came to represent the entire group. The firm then expanded into radio broadcasting when it acquired St. Louis radio station KPNT out of bankruptcy in 1990. River City changed the call letters and branded the station as "The Fox", a complement to his Fox affiliate. With the addition of the radio station, the company became River City Broadcasting (RCB).
KDNL finally took flight under River City ownership. Within a year, aided in part by the introduction of meters to measure ratings, the station doubled its total-day audience share from five to eleven percent, narrowly behind KPLR, as well as its revenue. By December 1993, it was the fourth highest-rated Fox affiliate in the nation, with an intensive focus on children's programming, counterprogramming the other stations, and Fox network programming. The 1994 edition of its Fox 30 Kids Fair, featuring guest appearances by two Power Rangers, attracted more than 50,000 attendees.
In February 1994, River City announced it would take the next step in growing KDNL-TV by starting a local half-hour 9 p.m. newscast to air beginning in early 1995. General manager Gregg Filandrinos credited the decision to start a newscast to Fox's acquisition of National Football League television rights. Renovation work estimated at more than $3 million began later that year to add news facilities to the channel 30 studios.
On August 26, 1994, ABC announced that KDNL-TV would become its St. Louis affiliate beginning in mid-1995. Once that took place, KDNL-TV planned to scale up its nascent news operation to a level befitting a "Big Three" affiliate. The already-planned 9 p.m. newscast would shift to 10 p.m. and be joined by new 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts. The agreement was concurrent with a renewal for two of the three ABC stations River City was buying at the time: WSYX-TV in Columbus, Ohio, and WLOS in Asheville, North Carolina. The third station, KOVR in Sacramento, California, was excluded because it was losing its ABC affiliation to a station owned by the Belo Corporation.
In its last months with Fox, on January 1, 1995, KDNL began airing a 9 p.m. newscast, News 30 Now. It was the first new television newsroom in St. Louis since KPLR went on the air in 1959 and heavily relied on talent from elsewhere. Of the station's anchors and reporters, only one was already working in the market—the station's public affairs director, who doubled as the weekend anchor. The on-air talent came from stations as far away as Winnipeg, Orlando, and Spokane, Washington. Unlike other startup newsrooms of the period at Fox affiliates, KDNL shied away from an offbeat, edgy style in favor of a more straightforward news presentation.
In addition, KDNL began airing in overnight hours in 1995 after becoming a secondary affiliate of UPN. KDNL dropped UPN programming in January 1998, leaving the network without a St. Louis affiliate until 1999, when Christian station KNLC briefly began airing some of its programming.
KDNL-TV became the new ABC affiliate in St. Louis on August 7, 1995, with its level of network programming increasing from 35 to 85 hours a week. KDNL aired all ABC programming that KTVI had aired but maintained KTVI's preemption of the soap opera Loving. Fox Kids programming did not immediately move to KTVI; KNLC stepped in to pick up the shows, but issues over signal quality and replacement of commercials with public service announcements (including urging children to protest an execution), plus the size of the Fox Kids Club in St. Louis, the nation's largest, resulted in the children's block moving to KTVI in September 1996.
Immediately upon the switch, News 30 moved from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. and debuted a 6 p.m. edition. The station also signed Don Marsh, a veteran St. Louis news anchor who had left KTVI the year before, to anchor its newscasts.
However, KDNL-TV's news efforts gained little traction and were plagued by high turnover as well as a reputation for sensationalized reporting. Tripp Frohlichstein, writing in the St. Louis Journalism Review, found the news department insufficiently staffed and the anchor team lacking chemistry; of the station's two daily newscasts, he wrote that KDNL-TV "gives the impression that it is not serious about the news". Don Marsh left the television news business in August 1998 when he failed to come to terms with Sinclair on a contract renewal; he was replaced by Patrick Emory, who had worked for CNN as well as KMOV-TV and KSDK. The other main anchor, Leslie Lyles—who had been with the station since the news department started—exited in 1999 and returned to Charleston, South Carolina, where she had been working prior to joining the KDNL news team. The station had three news directors in less than three and a half years, one of them—David Cohen—resigning in the wake of a racist joke he made at a news meeting. He told a Black reporter proposing a story on heart disease that "anyone who eats fried chicken and mashed potatoes is going to have heart disease". Gail Pennington of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would later comment that the constant changes in on-air personnel were anathema to viewers, noting that "St. Louis doesn't like change." Frohlichstein concurred, writing, "More than most cities, St. Louis viewers stick with what they know."
The manner in which the option agreement was transferred and executed instead led to a legal fight. In January 2000, Sinclair sued Emmis and Baker in its home state of Maryland and charged that the proposed buyer had no rights to acquire the stations, saying the option was too vague to take effect and was not designed to allow a party other than Baker to purchase them. In the lawsuit, Sinclair noted that Emmis asked Sinclair to pay millions of dollars to replace KDNL's transmitter and in employee severance costs, as well as to assign its ABC affiliation agreement unchanged to Emmis. The lawsuit was read by one Wall Street analyst as a stalling tactic to allow it to keep the cash flow from the radio stations for as long as possible before selling them. Two months later, Baker and Emmis filed a countersuit against Sinclair, accusing Sinclair of interfering with their agreement and engaging in "gross mismanagement" of the St. Louis stations. In June, Sinclair and Emmis settled the legal actions; Sinclair retained KDNL-TV and sold the St. Louis radio stations, the last ones it owned, to Emmis for $220 million.
The effect of the option agreement dispute was to leave KDNL-TV in a state of limbo and neglect for a year. Maintenance of the station's equipment fell off, and after a late 1999 fire affecting the transmission line on its Shrewsbury mast, the transmitter repeatedly failed, forcing KDNL off the air. Because of this and work to install KDNL's digital signal, which signed on January 2, 2001, the station operated on severely reduced power, leaving many non-cable homes without KDNL or ABC programming. The news department downsized from 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts, having abandoned the 6 p.m. timeslot in 1996, to just the 10 p.m. edition. While the early report was reinstated in December 2000, it could not regain the viewers it had, with more than twice as many St. Louis-area households watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch on KPLR-TV. Despite this turmoil, KDNL shocked industry observers by winning the regional Emmy Award for best large-market newscast.
Sinclair once again tried to sell the station in June 2002 as part of the company's eventually aborted attempt to sell all seven of its ABC-affiliated stations to focus on its Fox and WB stations.
Even without local news, KDNL has largely been among the weakest affiliates of ABC since switching to the network and generally ranks fifth in total ratings. The network's difficulty in St. Louis was not new: the market had always been an underperformer for ABC, even when KTVI was the affiliate, though NBC and CBS had higher-than-average viewership.
In 2017, Sinclair entered into an agreement to acquire Tribune Media, owner of KTVI and KPLR. The two stations were in the top four in ratings, but KDNL was not; Sinclair proposed to own KTVI and KDNL while providing services to KPLR. In February 2018, it amended its proposal to specify a spin-off of KPLR to an independent buyer. On April 24, 2018, the Meredith Corporation, owner of KMOV, announced that it would purchase KPLR-TV for $65 million; the bid was soon scratched amid objections by the Department of Justice, with Sinclair instead proposing to sell KPLR to a divestiture trust. The larger Sinclair–Tribune deal never progressed; after the FCC designated it for hearing by an administrative law judge, Tribune called off the deal and sued Sinclair in August 2018.
The program continued until April 9, 2018, when it was canceled by KDNL amid calls for a viewer and advertiser boycott. The cancellation took place two weeks after Allman Twitter a message alluding to him wanting to assault 17-year-old David Hogg, a student who was on campus at the time of the Parkland high school shooting, by sodomizing him with a heated fire poker for his gun control activism. Allman was fired from KFTK and took his Twitter account private. Allman was later re-hired by Salem Media Group-owned radio station KXFN in February 2019, though the program was short-lived after KXFN's sale to Relevant Radio, which converted it to a Spanish-language Catholic talk format in the fall of the same year. After converting his show to a self-distributed podcast, he now hosts mornings on KTLK-FM (104.9) after iHeartMedia converted that station to a conservative talk format in August 2021.
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