KION-TV (channel 46) is a television station licensed to Monterey, California, United States, affiliated with CBS, Fox, and Telemundo.

Schuyler had been the president of KTVU in Oakland, California, and Johnston chaired its board of directors before it was sold to Cox Broadcasting.

In 1968, a planned start date of September 1 was announced for the new KMBY-TV, which Johnston said would benefit from the recent addition of UHF tuning to all new televisions and from the widespread use of cable TV systems in Salinas, Monterey, and Santa Cruz.

[6] Schuyler would later note that one of the reasons the Central Coast was picked was because CBS had an interest in adding an affiliate in the area, with NBC already spoken for and KNTV in San Jose then serving the Salinas and Monterey area with ABC programming but no CBS outlet between KPIX-TV San Francisco and KCOY-TV in Santa Maria.

[8][9] KMST intended to begin broadcasting on January 25, 1969,[10] but bad weather kept the station off the air; the microwave link to receive KPIX-TV and CBS programming had not yet been installed.

Citing poor working conditions, KMST employees voted 43–2 to unionize with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 1989.

[17] Union negotiations remained incomplete in 1991, with AFTRA blaming station management for stalling and stating that the two-year turnover rate at KMST had reached 80 percent.

[19] In 1993, Retlaw sold KMST for $8.2 million to Harron-Smith Television Partnership,[20] a joint venture of Harron Communications and Smith Broadcasting.

Amid a major retooling of the station, the call letters were changed in October to KCCN-TV, representing the new title of its newscasts, "Central Coast News".

[29] It took more than a year for this transaction to receive FCC approval, due to the then-pending license renewals for both stations; the deal was completed on January 12, 2000.

[30] The Salinas hub served KION and KCBA as well as KFTY in Santa Rosa, KVIQ-TV in Eureka, and KMTR in Eugene, Oregon.

Instead, KION and KMUV-LP, along with KCOY-TV and KKFX-CA, the Clear Channel TV stations on the southern Central Coast, were sold to the Cowles Publishing Company of Spokane, Washington, for $41 million.

[37] After Entravision opted not to exercise an existing option to purchase KCBA's non-license assets from Seal Rock, that company entered into a new shared services agreement with NPG in September 2021.

[38] The first local newscasts on channel 46 launched with the station; for the first several years, KMST had no color cameras, so the programs aired in black and white.

After noon and 5 p.m. newscasts were axed in 1989 and 1990, the station was down to producing one hour of news a day; further, it lost six staffers to the upstart KCBA.