KVOS-TV (fictional)

KVOS-TV, virtual channel 12 (UHF digital channel 14), is a CBS-affiliated television station licensed to, United States, serving Northwest Washington and the Northern Olympic Peninsula. The station is owned by -based as part of a duopoly with CW affiliate KCWW-TV (channel 68). The two stations share studios on Ellis Street in Bellingham; their shared transmitter is situated atop on  in the, at an altitude of 2,621 feet (799 m) above the adjacent terrain. The station's signal is very well received throughout the British Columbia Lower Mainland, southern Vancouver Island, and much of northwest Washington.

Like with many other Bellingham TV stations, KVOS-TV has a large audience in, Canada. This includes, a city that is ten times more populous than all of KVOS' entire American viewing area combined. For many years, station promos and IDs have read "Bellingham/Vancouver/" to acknowledge its large cross-border viewership in Canada.

Early years
KVOS signed on June 3, 1953; owned by Bellingham businessman Rogan Jones along with KVOS radio (AM 790, now KGMI). Jones had owned the radio station since 1928, and was best known for being the focus of a case that established broadcasters' right to the same news reports as newspapers. Its first broadcast was a kinescope of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. Since Canada had no television stations operating west of Ontario at that point (it wasn't until that December that Vancouver would get a locally-operated TV station of their own in CBUT), the British government flew film of the BBC's coverage to Vancouver, where the Mounties escorted it to the border. The Washington State Patrol then drove the film to Bellingham. The station's original slogan was "Your Peace Arch Station, serving Northwest Washington and British Columbia."

KVOS initially experienced financial trouble, despite Jones thinking that he could successfully support a television station in a city the size of Bellingham. He built a powerful transmitter on Orcas Island in hopes of reaching Seattle, but even with increased power it didn't cover enough of the Seattle area to solve the problem. For a time, the revenues from his radio station were all that kept channel 12 afloat. In 1955, Jones, realizing that most of his audience was across the border, incorporated KVOS in Canada, establishing a subsidiary company in Vancouver. The subsidiary, KVOS-TV Limited, brought in revenue for the station by allowing many Vancouver-area businesses to buy advertising time on the station, which is still the case today. KVOS-TV continued to broadcast from Bellingham, with much of its audience based in southwestern British Columbia.

After just nine years of owning KVOS-TV, in 1962 Jones sold the station to Miami-based Wometco Enterprises.

Until 2009
KVOS began as an affiliate of DuMont upon sign-on in 1953 and remained so until DuMont folded in 1956. Since January 1, 1955, KVOS has been a CBS affiliate. For several years, the station also carried a number of programs syndicated from the Toronto-based independent station Citytv, whose owner CHUM Limited did not yet have an outlet in nearby Vancouver.

Wometco was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1984. KKR sold off the Wometco group in 1985, with KVOS sold to Ackerley Communications. In the early 1990s, due to Federal Communications Commission syndicated exclusivity rules affecting the Seattle media market, KVOS was dropped from most Seattle cable television systems.

KVOS was one of several CBS stations that preempted a November 22, 1998 60 Minutes episode which featured a segment focusing on controversial pathologist Jack Kevorkian that included a video of a voluntary human euthanasia that Kevorkian administered to ALS patient Thomas Youk two months earlier; KVOS replaced the offending 60 Minutes episode with a syndicated re-run of Coach. Some supporters for Kevorkian's cause decried the decision as a blatant example of censorship; in response, per a request by a group of local pro-euthanasia activists, CBS downlinked a special satellite feed of the episode's broadcast to the that was viewed by about 1,000 people, mainly euthanasia proponents and their supporters. Some area cable providers also carried the network feed of the episode by way of out-of-market CBS affiliates such as KIRO-TV in Seattle and in.

In 2001, CHUM Limited purchased the Vancouver station CKVU-TV from Canwest (turning it into a local version of Citytv in 2002, but beginning to air CHUM-provided programming on September 1, 2001) and launched a new station in Victoria known as CIVI-TV. The launch of the new outlets, along with a major series of affiliation and ownership changes in the Vancouver–Victoria market in September 2001, caused KVOS to be displaced by CIVI from its long-time home on channel 12 on many Vancouver-area cable systems.

The station came under the ownership of Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) in 2003, following that company's purchase of Ackerley. On November 16, 2006, Clear Channel announced that it would be selling half of it's television stations, including KVOS-TV, after being bought by private equity firms. On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to sell several of its television stations to Providence Equity Partners' Newport Television. Providence Equity initially announced that it would not keep KVOS or KFTY in Santa Rosa, California; instead, those stations were to be resold to LK Station Group. However, LK could not obtain financing, so KVOS was instead sold to (KFTY was eventually sold to High Plains Broadcasting, with Newport operating the station, it is now owned today by HC2 Holdings as KEMO-TV.)

Sale to Weigel Broadcasting
Nexstar announced on June 13, 2016, that it would sell KVOS to for $4 million. The sale was required as part of Nexstar's planned merger with to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership caps. The sale was completed on January 14, 2017.

On September 1, 2018, after a security guard denied him entry into KVOS/KCWW's studio/offices, 19-year-old Joshua Fischbacher crashed a pickup truck into a street-level window of the station's Ellis Street studios - which was stolen around 11:30 a.m. from a subcontractor. All of the duopoly's approximately 120 employees were evacuated and the building was placed on lockdown as troopers searched for the suspect. KVOS ran an automated feed of CBS programming for four hours, then switched to a time-shifted satellite relay of sister station  until KVOS/KCWW master control operators were able to resume broadcasting from the studio (this resulted in most of KVOS' syndicated programming being replaced with reruns of NCIS: Los Angeles and paid programming, and advertisements were replaced with direct response national advertising). Police officers captured the man just after 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, as he was watching news coverage of the incident in one of the facility's offices. Officers found weapons in the truck, but there were no reports of gunshots being fired. No staffers inside the building were injured. No motive for the attack was declared besides a desire to share pro-animal rights content with the station (a USB drive with videos was confiscated by another security guard). Fischbacher was taken to a hospital for a mental evaluation, and was later declared insane and sentenced to 12 months in rehab.

Syndicated programming
Syndicated programming on KVOS-TV includes The Drew Barrymore Show, Judge Judy, Divorce Court, UWF Wrestling and Judge Mathis, along with 2 Broke Girls and The Goldbergs on weekday evenings.

News operation
KVOS presently broadcasts 34 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with five hours each weekday and 4½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays).

On the morning of May 21, 1990, NewsView began broadcasts, originally starting as a half-hour show. NewsView featured a variety of local and regional news, sports, and weather for northwest Washington and the border communities of British Columbia. The first anchor was Cyndy Glenn, followed by Michele Higgins, Susan Cowden, Crystal King, Cara Buckingham, and Ty Ray. Reporters included Jeff Wyngaert, Amy Cloud, Dave Sienko and Joe Bates, while weather duties were covered (in the early years) by Jeff Kelly and Dave George, then Dan Leniczek, Dave Sienko, and Greg Otterholt. The newscast debuted at 6:30 a.m., and eventually expanded to a 90-minute show from 6:30 to 8 a.m.

The station has a high turnover rate among its on-air anchoring and reporting staff, with most eventually moving on to larger markets after a few years. Some staff have been with the station for a longer time, such as weekday evening anchor Grace Folwell, who joined in 1997 as a fill-in anchor.