What I'm more interested in is...
Why is the legal ID (COL) shown as Norwalk/Los Angeles? Not sure about '89,
but today you can put any location on the ID, as long as the COL is first. But L.A.
wasn't first.
This had to do, indirectly at least, with RKO General's legal troubles, which dated back to the 1960s. In 1965, a company called Fidelity filed a competing application against RKO for the channel 9 license, and it specified Norwalk instead of LA in hopes of winning "first local service" preference. The Fidelity competing application lingered on the FCC's books for 23 years, and in 1988 RKO finally lost the KHJ-TV license and Fidelity's 1965 application was granted, complete with "Norwalk" as the city of license.
But along the way, the FCC acknowledged that Norwalk wasn't sufficiently independent of Los Angeles to merit "first local service" preference...and in 1991 Fidelity (which had been bought out by Disney) asked the FCC to change the channel 9 COL back to Los Angeles, which it did.
(You can read the petition here:
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs//document/view.action?id=1004990001)
So channel 9 was licensed to Norwalk, but for only three years - from 1988 (when KHJ-TV became KCAL-TV) until 1991. Crazy, huh?
