Fox affiliation
After it acquired the television rights to broadcast games from the NFL's National Football Conference in December 1993,[3] Fox wanted to upgrade its affiliates in many markets, approaching owners of VHF television stations (broadcasting on channels 2 to 13) that had more value with advertisers than those within Fox's predominately UHF station portfolio for affiliation deals.[4] In May 1994, the network announced an extensive affiliation and programming agreement with New World Communications[5]—which owned, and was in the process of acquiring, stations in several large and mid-sized markets—in which most of the group's stations would switch their affiliations from one of the "Big Three" networks (CBS, ABC and NBC) to Fox beginning in the fall of 1994 and continuing over the next two years as affiliation contracts lapsed. More stations would switch to the network in 1995, when New World merged with Argyle Television and bought several stations from Citicasters. In turn, News Corporation purchased New World in September 1996, and merged it into its Fox Television Stations subsidiary in January 1997. As a result of Fox's influence in striking affiliations with additional VHF stations to help establish itself as the fourth major network, it sought to upgrade its affiliates—this time in smaller markets.
In March 1994, Fox's then-parent News Corporation entered into a partnership with minority-owned film and television production company Savoy Pictures to form a television station ownership group called SF Broadcasting.[6] On August 25, 1994, the company bought WALA, WVUE-TV in New Orleans, and KHON-TV in Honolulu 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).[7][8][9] As part of the deal, all four stations—which were then mostly NBC affiliates, aside from WVUE, then an ABC affiliate—would drop their Big Three affiliations and become Fox affiliates.
The final NBC program to air on WALA-TV was an NBC Sunday Night Movie presentation of Final Analysis at 8 p.m. Central Time on December 31, 1995, the day that channel 10 ended its 42-year affiliation with the network and became a Fox affiliate with WVUE and KHON also switched to that network on that same date, while WLUK had joined Fox in August 1995. The NBC affiliation moved to former Fox affiliate WPMI-TV (channel 15). Unlike the New World Communications-owned Fox affiliates that joined the network during the previous 18-month span, WALA ran Fox Kids programming on weekdays and Saturday mornings; until Fox discontinued the weekday block in December 2001,[11] Fox Kids ran Monday through Fridays from 1 to 4 p.m. (an hour earlier than most of its fellow Fox stations), replacing NBC's daytime soap opera lineup upon the switch; Fox Kids' Saturday morning block, meanwhile, aired in pattern. WALA, now rebranded as "Fox 10" upon the switch, also expanded its local news programming to around 25 hours each week, with expansions to its morning and evening newscasts.
Silver King Broadcasting and Emmis Communications ownership
On November 28, 1995, Silver King Communications (operated by former Fox executive Barry Diller) announced that it would acquire Savoy Pictures;[12] as a result, Savoy Pictures and Fox ended their partnership and sold the SF Broadcasting stations, including WALA-TV, to the USA Networks division Silver King Broadcasting. Silver King, which later became known as USA Broadcasting, owned several stations in large and mid-sized U.S. markets that were affiliated with the Home Shopping Network, which USA Networks also owned at the time. The sale of WALA and the other SF Broadcasting stations was approved and finalized in March 1996, with its other assets being merged into the company that November. On April 1, 1998, USA sold all four of its Fox stations to 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.[13]
Fox discontinued its weekday afternoon children's programming block, then running for only two hours in December 2001,[14] but retained its Saturday morning lineup. In 2002, the children's block was revamped as the FoxBox and then began to be programmed by
