TVIntheDesert

"Gary" is station owner Gary Cocola, who is the "king of Central Valley LPTVs." He leases most of those channels out to third parties.

They made the "Take Five" "newscast" from KUSK in Prescott, AZ in the '90s look professional.

There is no recorded evidence of this, but an LPTV in Phoenix tried to do its own local news in 1993, with News Director/anchor Jack Rebney (better known now for the viral video outtakes from a Winnebago dealers tape he did a few years prior). This was bad, but the "KDMA (K25DM) News" was probably worse. The previous Channel 53 in Fresno wasn't known for its high production values either:

Just what I figured. WGBH's Caption Center did the Cosby captions (and used that "CC in the TV screen" logo). They were one of the "big two" closed captioning producers in 1986. Others like VITAC would come later and take away business from NCI and WGBH/TCC.

I've looked at the TV schedules for KTVK and KPHO for the next couple weeks, and it appears that they are slowly adding home-grown Gray programming ("Investigate TV" and "The Song") to the weekend lineups. No sign of the "Power Nation" automotive block yet. The Meredith mistakes of the past couple years ("People" and the like) have still yet to be downgraded or removed from the schedule. "Full Court Press" is still airing on TEGNA's KPNX overnights on Sunday morning, due to a previous syndication contract.

But they do have a point. TV stations are losing viewers fast, but want to be compensated even more every year. The NAB is ruthlessly telling their member stations to pursue that retransmission dough, even while extolling free TV options like ATSC 3.0. There's got to be a point where MSO's say "enough is enough, we're losing money."

Kind of like Casper, Wyoming. Gray was basically running a news monopoly there because KTWO was a laughingstock, even before KYUR's owners bought it.

Interesting point. Maybe UPN already had the contract with Channel 25 (KCNG-LP, later KTUD-LP, now completely defunct), and didn't want any breach of contract suit filed by them if they were to affiliate with KFBT. I suspect UPN would have wanted to be on KFBT instead of the low-power, which had a hard time getting on cable at first. Vegas was a strange market for Sinclair pre-KSNV. The stronger (at the time) Channel 21 decided to go with MyNetworkTV instead of The CW when all that went down 15 years ago.

The Vegas case was strange. Channel 21(KUPN -> KVWB), which was wholly owned by Sinclair, went from UPN to WB. Channel 33 KFBT, had just been sold to a company affiliated with ACME Communications (headed by then-WB president Jamie Kellner) and LMA'd to Sinclair. I think the ownership issue was the reason why they didn't pick up UPN, which ended up on low-power Channel 25.

Is it CBSN National or CBSN DFW?

Their schedule looks better today than they did under their later Media General days, when they were showing third-rate syndicated programming during network off-hours.

I know the Phoenix market is hyper-competitive, but isn't KNXV close to the top in some time slots?

This shows a lot of people are stupid. They want the networks/stations yet gripe when they have a huge rate increase at the beginning of the year. Shouldn't they be able to put two and two together? It's not that infrastructure/maintenance costs increased that much. It's mainly programming costs.

The new WKYC "Circle 3" is reminiscent to KTVK's "Circle 3" circa 1980-82, except for not being italicized.

They've already posted their reason on http://tvpromise.att.com