KERO-TV went on the air on September 26, 1953, on channel 10 as an
NBC affiliate. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the
NTA Film Network. It was locally owned by Kern County Broadcasters along with KERO radio (1230 AM, now
KGEO). The two stations shared a studio in the lobby of the El Tejon Hotel, which was located at the corner of Truxtun Avenue and Chester Avenue. KERO-TV later moved to its current studios on 21st Street. The radio and TV stations were broken up in late 1955, when KERO radio was sold. Wrather-Alvarez Broadcasting, parent of
KFMB-AM-
TV in
San Diego, purchased KERO-TV in early 1957; when the Wrather–Alvarez partnership broke up a year later,
Jack Wrather kept KERO-TV and the San Diego stations as part of his newly renamed Marietta Broadcasting. In 1959, Wrather merged Marietta Broadcasting into
Buffalo, New York-based Transcontinent Television Corporation. One of KERO-TV's best remembered shows was ''Cousin Herb's Trading Post'', a local variety series in the 1950s. The show's host
Herb Henson was a
country musician, and often featured local artists such as
Buck Owens and
Tommy Collins, who would come to popularize the "
Bakersfield Sound". Another local favorite was
The Uncle Woody Show in the 1960s and 1970s. Radio and TV personality
Casey Kasem also used the KERO studios to tape a weekly musical TV variety show entitled
SheBang in the mid-to-late 1960s, while a disc jockey at
KRLA in
Los Angeles. As a result of the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) making both the Bakersfield and
Fresno television markets all-UHF through what was termed as
deintermixture, KERO-TV moved to channel 23 on July 1, 1963, and simulcasted on channels 10 and 23 for two months, with channel 10 being shut off at the end of August of the same year. The move of KERO-TV to channel 23 opened up channel 10 for use by
KLVX in
Las Vegas, which signed on the air in 1968. Transcontinent sold most of its stations to
Taft Broadcasting in 1964, but KERO was not included; it was sold to
Time-Life. Another publishing firm,
McGraw-Hill, acquired KERO-TV in 1972 along with the rest of Time-Life's broadcasting division—KOGO-TV (now
KGTV) in San Diego, KLZ-TV (now
KMGH-TV) in
Denver (its sole CBS affiliate at the time) and WFBM-TV (now
WRTV) in
Indianapolis. As its sister stations KGTV and WRTV switched to ABC in the late 1970s, it was expected that KERO-TV would eventually switch to from third-place NBC to first-place ABC. But instead, in March 1984, KERO-TV swapped affiliations with
KGET-TV and joined
CBS, citing the network's stronger programming in the Bakersfield area. On March 1, 1996, as part of a corporate affiliation deal between McGraw-Hill and ABC
spurred by a deal between
Group W and CBS, KERO picked up the ABC affiliation from cross-town rival
KBAK-TV (channel 29), and in the process became the second television station in the Bakersfield market (after KGET), and one of a handful of television stations in the United States, to have been an affiliate of all of the traditional
Big Three television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC). In August 2006, KERO-TV gained a sister station, KZKC-LP, then an Azteca América affiliate. On October 3, 2011, McGraw-Hill announced it was selling its entire television station group to the
E. W. Scripps Company for $212 million. The deal was completed on December 30, 2011. ==Programming==