When was the KHON-TV station established?
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KHON-TV first signed on the air on December 15, 1952 as a primary NBC affiliate, KONA-TV, occupying the channel 11 position. It also had a secondary affiliation with DuMont (which it later shared with KULA-TV, now KITV, after it signed on in 1954) until its demise in 1955. The station, which is Hawaii's second-oldest television station (behind KGMB, originally on channel 9, now on channel 5), was originally owned by Herbert Richards. Two years later in 1954, the "Honolulu Advertiser" purchased the station. On October 16, 1955, KONA changed channels from 11 to 2 due to the lower VHF positions (2 to 6) having the most powerful ERPs at the time. The channel 11 frequency now belongs to PBS member station KHET. In 1956, KONA was sold to Pacific and Southern Broadcasting, the forerunner of Combined Communications. KAII signed on in 1958, with KHAW following in 1961. In 1965, the station's call letters were changed to the current KHON-TV.
KHON-TV
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On January 1, 1996, KHON-TV switched its affiliation to Fox (and changed its on-air branding to ""Fox 2""); the NBC affiliation moved to former Fox affiliate KHNL (channel 13). Unlike the New World Communications-owned Fox affiliates that joined the network during the previous 18-month span, KHON ran Fox Kids programming on weekdays (until Fox discontinued the weekday block in December 2001, airing weekdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. and then from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. until the fall of 2001 when it was moved to 10:00 a.m. to noon) and Saturday mornings (until November 2008, when 4Kids Entertainment ceased programming Fox's children's block, with the network discontinuing its children's programming altogether). KHON also expanded its local news programming on weekdays, seeing an increase in newscast ratings with the affiliation switch. KHON currently has the distinction of having the highest-rated local news programming of any Fox affiliate nationwide, and also declares itself as "America's No. 1 Fox affiliate", though the network's Miami affiliate WSVN makes this claim as well. Neither station mentions Fox in its logo or branding; when KHON was rebranded to "KHON 2" in 2004, it became the first Fox station to ditch the network's brand standardization for its stations while it was still an affiliate. KHON is now one of only four Fox affiliates that omit network references in their branding (alongside WSVN, WDRB in Louisville, Kentucky—which had branded as "Fox 41" from 1996 to 2011, and KVRR in Fargo, North Dakota—which branded simply as "Fox" from the 1990s until March 2015).
On November 28, 1995, Silver King Communications (operated by former Fox executive Barry Diller) announced that it would acquire Savoy Pictures; as a result, Savoy Pictures and Fox ended their partnership and sold the SF Broadcasting stations, including KHON-TV, to the USA Networks division Silver King Broadcasting. Silver King, which later became known as USA Broadcasting, owned several stations on the United States mainland that were affiliated with the Home Shopping Network, which was also owned by USA Networks. The sale of KHON and the other SF stations was approved and finalized in March 1996, with its other assets being merged into the company that November.
KHON-TV
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Incidentally, KHON was a secondary affiliate of one of The CW's predecessor networks, UPN, from 2002 to 2004—at a time when secondary affiliations were more common and the advent of digital subchannels was not as widespread as it is today. "Hawaii's CW" does not have its own website; the only mentions of the subchannel on KHON's website are in the station's programming schedule and a link to The CW's website.
KHON-TV
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In March 1994, the Fox Broadcasting Company (then a division of News Corporation) entered into a partnership with minority-owned communications firm Savoy Pictures to form a television station ownership group called SF Broadcasting. On August 25, 1994, the company bought KHON, WVUE-TV in New Orleans, Louisiana and WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama for $229 million; fellow sister station WLUK-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin was sold to the company one month earlier in a separate $38 million deal, which for a time, was challenged by an FCC petition filed by NBC alleging that the deal violated foreign investment limits for U.S. broadcasters (a fifth Burnham station, KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, was excluded from the SF deal and was instead spun off to Westwind Communications, a new company formed by several former Burnham executives). As part of the deal, all four stations (three NBC affiliates, including KHON, and one ABC affiliate) would disaffiliate from their respective network and become Fox affiliates. Fox was slated to control the voting stock in the venture, but prior to the sale's closure in 1995, it was determined that Fox would still hold an interest in SF although it opted not to have voting stock in the company. Savoy Pictures controlled the day-to-day operations of the four stations.
KHON-TV
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On May 15, 2005, Emmis Communications announced that it would sell its 16 television stations in order to concentrate on its portfolio of radio stations. On September 15, Emmis sold KHON as well as CBS affiliate KOIN in Portland, Oregon, and NBC affiliates KSNW in Wichita and KSNT in Topeka, Kansas to the Montecito Broadcast Group (formerly SJL Broadcast Management) for $259 million; the sale closed on January 27, 2006. The acquisition resulted in one of the rare instances in which two stations operated in a duopoly were completely separated due to Emmis owning KHON and KGMB under a waiver.
KHON-TV
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In 1999, KHON relocated from its longtime studios on Auahi Street and moved to their current studios on Piikoi Street. Also on April 1 of that year, USA sold all four of its Fox stations to Indianapolis-based Emmis Communications for $307 million in cash and stock, as part of a sale of its major network affiliates in order to concentrate on its formerly HSN-affiliated independent stations.
KHON-TV
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The stations' digital signals are multiplexed:
KHON-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on January 15, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the State of Hawaii transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts (six months before the June 12 transition date for full-power stations on the U.S. mainland). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition VHF channel 8, using PSIP to display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 2.
KHON-TV
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From September 2002 to October 2004, KHON carried select UPN programming via a secondary affiliation shared with KGMB; each station aired programs from that network that the other station did not air. The two stations began carrying UPN programming in September 2002 after KFVE (which had been with UPN since its January 1995 launch) disaffiliated from the network to become a full-time affiliate of The WB (whose programming aired on KFVE in a secondary capacity since December 1998). KIKU, an independent station specializing in Japanese programming, became a secondary UPN affiliate in November 2004 and remained with the network until its closure in September 2006.
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On April 17, 1995, KHNL began producing a primetime newscast at 9 p.m. that was simulcast on KFVE; this newscast, by then a standalone program as KHNL dropped its 9 p.m. newscast after switching from Fox to NBC, was dropped on August 3, 1997. On October 18, 2004, KHNL began producing a primetime newscast for KFVE once more, this time airing exclusively on the station; KFVE was the only station in the market to carry its late evening newscast at 9 p.m. as Fox affiliate KHON-TV airs its late newscast at 10 p.m. However, KHON-TV added a 9 p.m. newscast in 2014. KHNL's production of KFVE's newscasts expanded on January 7, 2008, when the then-channel 5 began carrying an early evening newscast at 6:30 p.m. Later that year on December 22, KHNL began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; KFVE's newscasts were included in the upgrade.
KHII-TV
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KGMB's news department started shortly after it signed on the air in 1952, and had the highest-rated of the Honolulu market's newscasts for most of its first 25 years; after sports director Joe Moore joined KHON-TV (channel 2) in 1978, KHON overtook KGMB for the lead, with KGMB's newscasts placing either second or third in the ratings for the next three decades. KHNL had run newscasts intermittently since signing on as independent station KTRG in 1962, it formed its longest-running news department to date in April 1995 as a Fox affiliate with the launch of a 9 p.m. newscast (that was simulcast on KFVE until January 1996, when it became exclusive to the latter station); KHNL added newscasts at 5, 6 and 10 p.m. during the summer and fall of 1995, with the addition of a weekday morning newscast after it joined NBC on January 1, 1996.
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