[BC] KFRC becomes KEAR

[Scott Fybush]

>I believe the change of ownership was in April or thereabouts.  KFRC (AM) 
>continued to
>carry Oakland A's baseball through the remainder of the season, to honor 
>an existing
>contract.  It may have retained the old call through that time, but as you 
>say, the FCC
>database makes that hard to determine, and I'm no longer in the Bay Area 
>to find out
>firsthand...

The call change took place Oct 17 2005, at least according to CDBS. 610 was 
definitely still identifying as KFRC, albeit with Family Radio programming, 
when I was out there in July.

That Infinity had to sell 610 at all was the result of some strangeness in 
the current radio-TV crossownership rules when Viacom bought KOVR-TV in the 
Sacramento market earlier this year. While the old contour-overlap rules 
are dead now in radio, they're still on the books when evaluating market 
caps for radio-TV crossownership, and in a weird way - they look at how 
many co-owned radio stations put a signal over the city limits of the TV 
city of license. KOVR's actually licensed to Stockton, but it's part of a 
Viacom TV duopoly with KMAX-TV Sacramento, and 610's 0.5 mV/m contour hits 
Sacramento. (Amazingly, they have measurements that show that KCBS 740's 
0.5 does NOT reach Sacramento, which I find hard to believe.) With 610 in 
the picture, along with KOVR/KMAX and its one AM and four FMs in 
Sacramento, Viacom was one station over the combined radio/TV limit.

And that set up the station swap with Family - it got 610 and netted 
something like $40 million in much-needed cash, while Infinity got Family's 
106.9, which does not overlap with Sacramento at all, and which gave 
Infinity a platform to launch its "Free FM" talk format in San Francisco.

>I think it's ironic that Les Moonves is making such grand statements to 
>the press about
>the history of CBS Radio, and the pride the company has in that history, 
>when it allows--
>in fact required--another part of that history to be trashed.  There was 
>no good reason
>for Infinity to demand that the call be stripped from the AM, as it's 
>quite common these
>days for the same call to be used by different owners in different services.

I don't know that I'd blame Les, or Viacom/Infinity/CBS at all, for taking 
the KFRC call off AM. Family has a long association with the KEAR calls. 
That's been their San Francisco flagship station for something like 45 
years now, and it's understandable that they'd want to keep those calls 
when they moved to AM. And the KFRC calls are alive and well on Infinity's 
99.7 FM, so they're hardly gone from the market.

The bigger trashing of history, to my mind, is the fairly recent complete 
disappearance of the three-letter KYA and KRE calls from the market. Once 
those calls are gone, they're not ever coming back... (absent a change in 
FCC policy, like the one that allowed KRE to be revived in the seventies 
after having lapsed for a few years.)

s