KOVR (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Stockton, California, United States, serving as the CBS outlet for the Sacramento area.

After an application process stretching back to 1948, KOVR began broadcasting in September 1954 from studios in Stockton and a transmitter atop Mount Diablo.

[3] Two other groups applied for the channel by late 1948,[4] but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a freeze on new television station grants that October.

[7] Radio Diablo, headed by O. H. Brown, estimated it could serve 3.5 million people in San Francisco, Stockton, and Sacramento from its mountaintop site.

Broadcaster and furniture store owner Edward Peffer entered into a similar agreement,[8] paving the way for the FCC to grant Radio Diablo the construction permit on February 11, 1954.

[9] KOVR began broadcasting September 6, 1954;[10] after an opening night telecast produced in the Stockton studios, it aired live coverage from the California State Fair.

[11] KOVR was the second television station in Stockton; an ultra high frequency (UHF) outlet, KTVU (channel 36), had gone on the air the previous December.

Sportscaster Bob Fouts began commuting to Stockton from San Francisco to host a sports show, leaving KGO-TV in that city, and regional news coverage and a bingo program were also slated.

[19][20] In December 1955, Variety magazine reported that CBS, which coveted a VHF owned-and-operated station to serve San Francisco but had affiliate KPIX-TV there instead, was bidding on KOVR.

In a bid to obtain the ABC affiliation while eliminating overlap to ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, KOVR filed in August 1956 to move from Mount Diablo to Butte Mountain near Jackson in Amador County, a proposal that blindsided KCCC-TV.

[25] This application was initially approved by the FCC in November,[26] though KCCC-TV management protested the decision as a Stockton station encroaching on the Sacramento market.

[44] While an FCC examiner's initial decision favored McClatchy for the station,[45] its competition, a group known as Sacramento Telecasters and consisting of non-broadcast interests, successfully objected the award on diversification of media ownership grounds, with the FCC unanimously overturning the examiner and granting Sacramento Telecasters the permit for what signed on as KBET-TV.

The sale was initially opposed by a group calling itself the Citizens Committee to Promote Fair Coverage, which felt that a McClatchy purchase of KOVR would result in a "monopoly of news",[48] while the Stockton city council, fearful of the station reducing its presence in its city of license, initially voted unanimously to request an FCC hearing[49] before rescinding the resolution after Eleanor McClatchy wrote to the body, assuring them that the station would not leave.

[50] The FCC initially indicated the deal would require a hearing, an action recommended by commission staff,[51] but reversed course in July 1964, approving the acquisition on a 5–2 vote.

In 1969, McKeon Construction, a Sacramento firm, asked a U.S. district court to void the FCC's 1964 approval of the sale, which it claimed enhanced an existing monopoly on regional advertising; McClatchy sources told Broadcasting magazine that the firm's ire had likely been provoked by unflattering coverage of its owner and of political pressures placed by Sacramento construction companies.

[54] Similarly, in 1974, the San Joaquin County Economic Development Association appealed to the FCC and asked it to review whether KOVR was adequately serving Stockton.

In 1975, the FCC moved to bar future acquisitions that created cross-ownership and ordered 16 such groups in small markets to break up their holdings, though others were allowed to remain grandfathered.

[56] Two years later, on March 1, 1977, a federal appeals court amplified the policy; instead of merely barring future purchases against the rule, it ordered the divestiture of all such pairings except those that were in the public interest.

The former two groups emphasized the unfamiliarity of the companies to their new markets, calling McClatchy "totally foreign" to upstate South Carolina and Multimedia "completely unknown to the Sacramento community".

[61] While the community organizations abandoned their opposition to the trade, San Joaquin Communications Corporation refused to yield, and the transaction reached its deadline date of March 1, 1978, without being adjudicated by the FCC.

[62][63] McClatchy entered into an agreement to sell KMJ-TV to the San Joaquin Communications Corporation in May 1979, seeking to avoid a lengthy legal battle over the Fresno outlet.

Citing "increasingly strong government opposition" to cross-ownership, president C. K. McClatchy II noted that he felt it was in the community interest to ensure an "orderly transition" of ownership at KOVR.

[75] In a management buyout that restored Outlet Communications to separate status, Rockefeller Group sold the firm in 1986 for $625 million (equivalent to $1.47 billion in 2023 dollars).

[77] Amidst these two transactions, KOVR laid off 10 employees, and morale was low due to poor ratings in part attributable to the national underperformance of ABC at the time.

The Bass Group had been making major business investments in Sacramento, including a purchase of land in Roseville and the acquisition of the insolvent American Savings and Loan in Stockton.

Outlet had bought land in Natomas for a potential new studio site, but Narragansett sold the parcel; Anchor began scouting property in West Sacramento.

[71] In the 1990s and early 2000s, despite a general lack of investment from Sinclair—which stripped the station of its helicopter and satellite truck and abandoned having a weeknight sports anchor—and a comparatively underresourced position, the lean KOVR news operation began to show signs of improvement and increased ratings.

[107] The station's signal is multiplexed: Though it does not host any additional subchannels, KOVR is part of Sacramento's ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) deployment on KQCA, which began operating in July 2021.