. The top-mounted antenna at left is used for KMEX-DT.|alt=Refer to caption There were two prior attempts to build a station on
ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 34 in Los Angeles prior to KMEX-TV, in proceedings in 1954 and 1958. By 1953, the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had received three applications for the channel, from Lawrence Harvey; Spanish International Television; and radio station
KFWB (980 AM). The bid of Spanish International Television presaged that of Spanish International Broadcasting Company six years later;
Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta was a 20 percent owner of the firm. Harvey and Spanish International Television lost interest, and their applications were dismissed in 1954, leaving the door open for KFWB. That October, however, the radio station dropped its bid; no reason was given. Interest around the UHF allocation was revived in 1957, and in 1958, the FCC selected the application of Sherrill C. Corwin, movie theater operator from San Francisco, over a bid from Frederick Bassett and William E. Sullivan. After the FCC ordered several unbuilt UHF stations to make progress or lose their permits, Corwin proposed to sell the construction permit for what was called KMYR to Franklin James, who owned part of several regional radio stations. However, this never was completed, and the FCC deleted the KMYR permit in November 1960 (along with another Corwin held for a San Diego outlet), leaving the door open for new applications for channel 34.
The early years On August 18, 1961, the Spanish International Broadcasting Company (SIBC) filed an application to build a new channel 34 TV station in Los Angeles. SIBC's principals reflected strong Mexican connections: Azcárraga was a 20-percent stakeholder, with the balance being held by a number of stockholders including movie theater owner Frank Fouce, the largest shareholder, and Julian Kaufman, the general manager of
Tijuana's binational TV station,
XETV. The FCC granted the permit on November 1, 1961, marking the first time the commission had approved an application specifying an all-foreign language TV station. From Mexico City came
Rene Anselmo to manage channel 34; so too would come much of the programming, from
Telesistema Mexicano. It was also the first regular commercial UHF television station in Los Angeles. Two stations had previously operated on the band:
KTHE channel 28, a short-lived educational station at the
University of Southern California, and
KBIC-TV channel 22, whose only telecasts to that point had been of an experimental nature. To get the Spanish-speaking community to be able to tune in, the upstart channel 34 embarked on a $100,000 public awareness campaign for UHF converters, and manufacturers stocked stores in
East Los Angeles with tuning strips. While channel 34 had been set for a September 15 launch, interest in converters was so great that the station opted to broadcast the test pattern until September 30 to aid dealers installing equipment. The first day of KMEX-TV programming included an inaugural program; filmed coverage of the recent visit of President
John F. Kennedy to Mexico City; sporting coverage, including
bullfighting; and news. Some 30,000 converters were estimated to be in place at launch. By February 1963, there were 106,000 appropriately equipped households who could tune in the UHF station, and that number had swelled to almost 200,000 by the end of channel 34's first year in service. However, KMEX lost $500,000 in its first year and did not turn a profit until three years after starting up. Joseph S. Rank, an account executive with sales representative Blair Television, became general manager in November 1964 and was promoted to station vice president in 1966, also being a five-percent stockholder in the Spanish International Broadcasting Corporation. In local production, the station placed a focus on public service programming to supplement the Telesistema Mexicano programs that came from Mexico City on Greyhound buses. One of the earliest programs was
Escuela ("School"), an educational program that aired four times a week and taught basic English to viewers of all nationalities. Beginning in 1964, the program was hosted by Ginger Cory, a teacher for the
Los Angeles Unified School District. Students mailed written exercises to Cory for grading. Many in
Southern California's non-
English-speaking community came to consider Cory as a friend and counselor. After station executives found that as much as 15 percent of KMEX's audience were not Spanish-speakers, courses in Spanish were added by popular demand. When American president
Lyndon B. Johnson and Mexican president
Adolfo López Mateos met in Los Angeles in February 1964, channel 34 produced commercial-free coverage which was sent to XETV and Telesistema Mexicano; the decision not to take advertisements was made because there was a desire to avoid any misunderstandings among the Spanish-speaking community. Also in 1964 was channel 34's first coverage of the
Tournament of Roses Parade, with radio commentators utilizing visuals furnished by
KTLA; previously, Spanish-language coverage on other stations consisted of a radio simulcast. While still with the
Los Angeles Rams, the team's kicker,
Danny Villanueva, became a sports announcer for the station in 1964; he continued in this role even after being traded to the
Dallas Cowboys. He remained at channel 34 after retiring from the
NFL, becoming its news director, and was promoted by Rank to station manager in 1969. Villanueva increased the public service emphasis at channel 34 even further, describing the station as "a cross between a commercial and an educational station" with a "tremendous social obligation". Much of this philosophy was later copied by other Spanish-language TV stations in the United States. KMEX had been the second American station (after
KWEX-TV in
San Antonio, Texas) in what was the Spanish International Network; the venture also included Telesistema Mexicano-aligned stations along the United States–Mexico border. After buying into
New York City-area station
WXTV and Miami's
WLTV, in 1972, SIN made its first western expansion when it built
KFTV, serving
Fresno, with Villanueva as its general manager. Originally, the Fresno station operated as a direct satellite of KMEX. The "SIN West" subnetwork also provided service to affiliated stations in
Modesto (
KLOC-TV) and
San Francisco (
KEMO-TV) and Telesistema Mexicano's
XEWT-TV in Tijuana and
XHBC-TV in
Mexicali.
NFB In 1973, channel 34 unveiled an experimental daytime programming effort aimed at a different audience: English speakers. On July 9, KMEX-TV started at 6:30 a.m. and premiered
NFB (News, Finance, Business), the first-ever attempt at a rolling news television program, which aired for hours. Boasting a staff of 28 including 11 on-air talent,
NFB featured
John Harlan as one of its anchors and
Bill Stout and
Susan Stafford, as well as Villanueva, as contributors. However, it exceeded its budget by 100 percent, and when SIBC parent Spanish International Communications Corporation (SICC) could not obtain funding in a tight financial market, the program was pulled on October 26, having lost $300,000. Villanueva felt that, if funding had been available, such a service would have been a "tremendous success" in the long run. Other reasons cited for its failure were its association with channel 34, a Spanish-language television station, and airing on the lesser-viewed UHF band.
Univision and competition SICC had an increasingly convoluted ownership structure and several related businesses. In 1974, the company took a bank loan that required it to not expand until the loan was repaid. As a result, to fuel continued expansion, SICC principals created two additional companies to start new stations: Bahía de San Francisco Television Company (which built
KDTV in San Francisco) and Legend of Cibola Television Company (which reorganized as Seven Hills Television and started
KTVW in Phoenix). In 1975, Anselmo arranged a new bank loan which came with a realignment of control that favored Anselmo and Azcárraga's interest. As a result, the Fouce interests sued SICC, Anselmo and other defendants in 1976, charging "self-dealing, mismanagement, waste, and breach of fiduciary duty". This long-running suit joined with a separate legal problem—a push by a confederation of Spanish-language radio station owners alleging Azcárraga exercised control over SICC, resulting in impermissible foreign ownership of its stations. In 1985, FCC staff recommended that the licenses of the SICC stations not be renewed, a decision adopted by a commission administrative law judge as settlement talks began in the long-running Fouce suit. In May 1986, in a breakthrough in the Fouce case, the parties agreed to sell KMEX and the four-other stations directly owned by SICC. The FCC agreed to renew the stations' licenses in 1987 as part of the sale of SIN—then being renamed Univision—to
Hallmark Cards and
First Chicago Ventures. At the same time as SICC's ownership drama played out, the Los Angeles Spanish-language television market transformed. For more than two decades, KMEX-TV was the only full-time Spanish-language TV station, though other stations aired some programming or had a partial-day Spanish format, such as
KSCI and KBSC-TV. This changed in late 1985, when KBSC-TV was sold to
Saul Steinberg-backed Reliance Capital and relaunched as
KVEA, a key moment in the formation of
Telemundo in early 1987. The management of the new full-time competitor felt that there was enough of a market for both stations to coexist, which was borne out by audience surveys in the wake of the launch of KVEA. However, its 22-year head start gave the station an extraordinarily high level of community identification; Villanueva noted that many people saw it as "our Channel 34". The restructured Univision had a strong presence in Miami, and conflicts between Cuban Americans at the network level and KMEX's largely Mexican audience in Southern California bred internal concerns. In 1989, channel 34 employees sent a letter to the network asking that the station's news director vacancy be filled by someone "who reflects the interests ... experience and culture of the Los Angeles TV audience". One consultant noted that under Villanueva, who had recently left as general manager, the station made money but did little to reinvest in its news product compared to Miami's WLTV. That same year, another future leader in Spanish-language broadcasting left the station: Walter Ulloa, founder of
Entravision Communications, who had worked as an editorial writer, sales manager and news director at channel 34 before leaving in 1989 to start Entravision. Despite the increased competition from KVEA and other stations, KMEX maintained its lead and continued to grow. By 1990, it accounted for nearly 10 percent of all of the advertising revenue of Hispanic television, radio, and print media in the United States. It moved twice in ten years, first in 1992 and then to a facility in the Howard Hughes Center in 2002. However, even in the early 2000s, station revenues lagged its share of total ratings, common for the time among Spanish-language TV stations. With Univision's acquisition of the
USA Broadcasting stations in January 2002, KMEX became part of a
duopoly with KHSC-TV (channel 46), which became
KFTR when Univision used the stations to launch the Telefutura network (now
UniMás). ==Local programming==