KIFR (channel 49) is a television station in Visalia, California, United States, serving the Fresno area as a Classic Arts Showcase affiliate.
In 1985, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted an application by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno—which learned of the channel a week before the deadline to file[3]—to build a new non-commercial educational television station on the channel 49 allocation in Visalia, beating out a bid from the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the Tulare County board of education.
Construction of the transmitter on Blue Ridge proved to be a test of sensitivity; the tower required environmental approval because the site is a roosting area for the California condor, and the county approved the tower over protests by Native American groups, who argued that the ridge was sacred ground and had been used for centuries as a communication point for smoke signals between tribes on different sides of the Sierra.
[4] (The call letters had previously had a long history in California on the CBS owned-and-operated station on channel 2 in Los Angeles, which became KCBS-TV in 1984.)
It did not take long for the diocese's new television station to be a financial drain, in part because it was approved far faster than had been anticipated,[5] as TBN had unexpectedly withdrawn its application.
[19] KNXT was one of nearly 1,000 television stations that were required to change their digital channel allocation in the upcoming spectrum auction repack in late 2017 or early 2018.