De Rance, Mulderrig, and Cox years
Missionary Radio Evangelism, still facing indebtedness and what it termed as "cash flow difficulties", continued to find a buyer,[14] and the De Rance Foundation, a Catholic organization from Milwaukee, acquired 20 percent of KCIK in 1982 with an option to purchase the rest. It was the first broadcasting property owned by De Rance and marked the station's transition to a full-time secular independent.[15] De Rance acquired the remainder in 1983.[16]
The new owners moved to bolster programming, even airing Nightline when KVIA-TV dropped it from its schedule.[17] After a shift in strategy to further deemphasize religious programs, in 1986, KCIK-TV signed up as a charter affiliate of Fox,[18] an arrangement its general manager called a "no-lose situation".[19] Because Fox offered little programming at the outset, the station still considered itself an independent with a stronger "independent look".[20]
After a high-profile failure of its Catholic television programming elsewhere at its other broadcast property, KIHS-TV in the Los Angeles market, the De Rance Foundation began its retreat from broadcasting. Having paid $5 million for the station in 1982, it sold the station at a loss for the same price six years later to John and Betty Ann Mulderrig of New York, who owned no other television stations, at a time when it had "turned the corner", per its general manager.[21] Mulderrig had previously been an executive at WWOR-TV in the New York City area. KCIK-TV was posting ratings in some time periods that made it one of the highest-rated independent stations in the United States,[22] and it had made money for the first time ever in 1987.[23] To enhance its connection to the network, the station at the start of 1994 changed its call letters to KFOX-TV.[24] Mulderrig moved the station later that year into a former Coronado Bank building at 6004 North Mesa Street, having outgrown the original studios on Stanton Street.[25]
In 1996, Mulderrig sold KFOX-TV for $21 million to Cox Television, bringing to a close an eight-year ownership that had seen the station and its network grow.[26] Cox started a local newsroom in El Paso in 1997.
KFOX-TV began transmitting a digital television signal in January 2003.[27] KFOX-TV ended regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 14, at midnight on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 15, using virtual channel 14.[28] As part of the SAFER Act, KFOX-TV kept its analog signal on the air until July 12 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.[29]
