Do independent television stations still exist?

July 17, 2005 7:31 AM

Do independent television stations still exist?

While surfing through television channels with a little VHF/UHF antenna I came to realize that every broadcast station on the dial is either a network affiliate (ABC, CBS, etc.), an all-religious or all-infomercial channel, a flavor of PBS, or localized Univision.

Are there still little independent television stations out there that get by on syndicated programming and local shows that the station itself produces? Or are these stations largely a thing of the past?

posted by Servo5678 to media & arts (11 comments total)

There's one here in Chicago.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:31 AM on July 17, 2005

Sure. Pretty much any station that carries UPN or the WB is that type of station, since neither of those "networks" yet has more than a tiny bit of programming (only a couple hours a night, and not every night, either), no sports, no news, etc.
posted by kindall at 9:35 AM on July 17, 2005

The San Francisco area has several, notably KRON, a former NBC affiliate that went independent when NBC bought another station in the area a few years ago.

Pretty much any station that carries UPN or the WB is that type of station

No. By any definition that matters, these are not independent stations. They operate according to different rules and make programming decisions in different ways.
posted by jjg at 11:24 AM on July 17, 2005

There's one in New Hampshire, with the call-sign WNDS.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:34 AM on July 17, 2005

jjg: how is a WB or UPN "affiliate" different from a "pure" independent during that vast majority of the time when the WB and UPN networks are offline?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:53 AM on July 17, 2005

Here is one in central Pennsylvania. Half televangelist, half shopping. I'd be willing to bet that many of the remaining independent stations are religious broadcasters.
posted by jessenoonan at 11:55 AM on July 17, 2005

Western Washington has KONG-TV, although it's associated with (and operated by) the local NBC affiliate KING 5 and both are owned by Belo Corp, so whether or not you can classify it as "independent" depends on what you actually mean by independent.

KONG is a fairly new invention, created after both of the existing independents joined UPN (KSTW) and The WB (KTZZ, which became KTWB).
posted by nmiell at 1:59 PM on July 17, 2005

Just because a very few companies dominate the television business, that doesn't mean there's a simple answer to this question.

In the good old days, no company could own more than a handful of TV stations, and no two in the same "market". Thus the Network O&O's (Owned and Operated) in a few of the largest cities vs. "affiliates" elsewhere. But there were a lot more "station groups", some affiliates, some non-network "Independents". But the owner of an "Independent" station in one city could (and often did) own affiliates in other cities. While the rules have been all but eliminated, no Network has the resources to buy all its affiliated stations (and many of them would never sell). All non-O&O affiliates have some freedom from their Network. TimeWarner (theWB) doesn't own ANY stations, Viacom owns both CBS and UPN, so they certainly have less leverage over their affiliates. Still, the stations usually use the Network Image proudly during their mostly non-network schedule (It's not Channel 13, it's UPN13!)

But let's look at the situation in weird-old Los Angeles.
Viacom/CBS owns channel 2, NBC/Universal owns channel 4, Disney/ABC owns 7, NewsCorp/FOX owns 11; that's the easy part.
Channel 5 is owned by Tribune Corp. (Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times) and affiliated with theWB; Trib actually owns a small interest in TimeWarner, and both their Chicago (WGN) and L.A. (KTLA) statons are sold to out-of-town cable companies as "Superstations".
Channel 9 is also owned by Viacom/CBS, but airs nobody's network shows - they share a news operation with Channel 2 and do local newscasts throughout prime time; you couldn't call them Independent.
Channel 13 is also owned by NewsCorp/FOX, but is affiliated with UPN (which is owned by Viacom); WHY? That's the way the channels lined up before the Viacom and NewsCorp bought their second stations, and they just keep renewing the contracts.
Channel 30 is owned by PAX Broadcasting, which owns most of the stations on its makeshift network, but NBC owns 20% of PAX.
I don't know enough about the Spanish Language stations in L.A., but there are two major networks, Univision and Telemundo, with affiliates, and other Spanish Language stations doing local news and getting programming from networks outside the U.S.
Some all-evangelical stations are owned by groups like Trinity Broadcasting and Daystar (which is right now fighting to buy out a PBS station in Orange County, the the OC school district that owns it wants it to go to a non-profit foundation that'll keep it PBS).
There are 4 PBS affiliates in the area, including one owned by the L.A. Ciy School District.
Home Shopping Network owns a UHF station.
The one true Locally-Owned Independent Station (English-Language) in the market is Anaheim-based KDOC, which airs a schedule of "Hawaii Five-O", "Little House on the Prairie" and "Perry Mason" reruns (with mostly infomercials and evangelists on the weekends).

So what IS an "Independent" TV station? Good question.
posted by wendell at 2:05 PM on July 17, 2005

So what IS an "Independent" TV station? Good question.

Here's my chain of thought: WFTV 9 in the Orlando market is the local ABC affiliate. They air ABC programming in prime time, the 6:30 evening news, and morning news programming. They produce their own local news from 5am - 7am and 5pm - 6:30pm, then again at 11pm. During the day they air talk shows until it's time for ABC soap operas. Overnight is reruns of the day's local news and the early morning ABC news program.

About fifteen years ago there was a WBSF 43 in Orlando, FL. They had no network affiliation. They aired syndicated childrens' cartoons (DuckTales, etc.), reruns of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms, and produced their own little news and entertainment shows with local bands and regional talent. They pretty much aired what they wanted when they wanted it. That's my idea of an independent station. Today they are 24 hour home shopping as an affiliate to the Home Shopping Network.

Around the same timeframe there was WAYK 56 and WIND 52, one in Daytona Beach and the other in Melbourne. They were owned by the same owner and aired the same programming; the only difference between the two were the channel numbers and names. They aired exactly one hour of The Jetsons reruns and then 23 hours of infomercials. That's also my idea of an independent, although they had a crappy schedule. They were knocked off the air when an Air Force plane crashed into their tower. Today they're an all-religous channel.
posted by Servo5678 at 4:35 PM on July 17, 2005

jjg: how is a WB or UPN "affiliate" different from a "pure" independent during that vast majority of the time when the WB and UPN networks are offline?

How is any network affiliate (NBC, CBS, etc.) different from an independent during those times that they aren't running network programming? They aren't -- which is exactly my point. The concept of an independent station has nothing to do with how many hours of network programming you run. It's whether you run network programming at all.
posted by jjg at 10:53 PM on July 17, 2005

CFMT, Ontario, Canada seems to still be independent. It was bought out by a Canadian media conglomerate, Rogers, though. :-(

As Rogers doesn't exactly have a real "Master" TV brand like any of the other major ones in Canada (CTV, ATV, CBC, SRC, Global, City, A-Channel, etc) CFMT still shows stuff that very much proves it's independent (often that means it sucks in a laughably incompetent way -- for example the female [always, from my experience -- but I haven't watched CFMT for a long time] announcer that comes on during bumper commercials to tell you new and totally unimportant information, like, for example, who invented windsheild wipers and why, etc, etc).

If you check that Wikipedia link and start clicking about on the stations at the bottom you'll find a great resource for independent stations, all labelled as "IND" (although some of that is inaccurate as some of the stations rebroadcast/have sister stations, like CityTV).
posted by shepd at 12:44 AM on July 18, 2005