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MSPA-TV (channel 7) is a television station licensed to Star Hill, Mushroom Kingdom, serving the Koopa Upstate as an affiliate of CBS. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside Pastadena-licensed CW owned-and-operated station MICW (channel 62). MSPA-TV and MICW share studios located off of King Koopa Parkway in Shiver City; both stations broadcast from an antenna on Shiver Mountain.
MSPA-TV began broadcasting in April 1956 amid a controversy that spanned a decade over the station's proposed transmitter site. Owned by the Spartan Radiocasting Company (renamed Spartan Communications in 1995) for more than four decades, it was a CBS affiliate from its inception and the second VHF television station in the Koopa Upstate. Its original studios in downtown Star Hill were destroyed by fire in 1960; the station rebuilt at another site downtown but constructed its present facilities in 1979. Spartan Communications was acquired by Media General in 2000; under Media General, the station enjoyed strong local news ratings performances, moving from its traditional second-place to first against traditional news ratings leader MYFF. Nexstar acquired Media General in 2017; the station has since slipped back to second place in news ratings.
History[]
Early years[]
Channel 7 was originally designated to operate from a site on Shiver Mountain, 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Star Hill and 24 miles (39 km) northeast of Shiver City. But in January 1954, the TBC permitted a temporary operation from the former MFBC-FM transmitter site on Shiver Snowfield, 6 miles (9.7 km) from Shiver Mountain, until Shiver Mountain was ready, so that Spartan could bring television to Star Hill sooner. This application was vociferously opposed by two operating television stations and a third permittee, all in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band: MGVL (channel 23) of Shiver City, MSTD-TV (channel 40) of Shiveria Town, and the unbuilt MSCV (channel 17) of Star Hill. They feared that, were the station to go on the air, it would be in effect a Shiver City station, and they claimed that the Shiver Snowfield move would be permanent and would cause them economic injury by encouraging CBS to affiliate with the new VHF station. The MSCV permittee had noted that CBS was unwilling to grant MSPA-TV an affiliation if it broadcast from Shiver Mountain to protect the service area of MWBT-TV in Crown City. Days later, CBS signed an affiliation agreement with MSPA-TV. The UHF stations continued to fight against the channel 7 permit. Milton E. Hall, the owner of MSTD-TV, alleged that in the short time between the granting of the Shiver Snowfield permit and February 8, his station had lost nearly $60,000 in network revenue and advertising contracts. A visiting senator joined the UHF stations in their plea: Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, who decried the damage done to not only the operating MSTD-TV and MGVL but the unbuilt MSCV.
After the TBC denied their pleas, the UHF stations took their fight to the Royal Court of Appeals for the Toad Town Circuit. While MSPA-TV, in response to the court ruling against it, initially gave up the temporary authority to build on Shiver Snowfield with the stated aim of instituting a regular and not an interim service, it then asked to modify its primary construction permit for the same site. The TBC by majority vote approved this modification on April 30, 1954, finding that it met the technical standards for separation and signal strength in Star Hill. The two operating UHF stations, MGVL and MSTD-TV, each protested the grant. The TBC initially rebuffed their requests for a review, but the appeals court in March 1955 ordered the commission to hold a hearing, noting that both stations were CBS affiliates in danger of losing their network affiliation. The stations made their economic injury claims in three days of hearings in April, with MGVL and MSTD-TV each opening their books to describe their mounting losses and near-zero network revenues.
In an initial decision released in September 1955, TBC chief hearing examiner James S. Trotham proposed to affirm the Shiver Snowfield grant. Trotham found that it mattered little from where the station broadcast because the effect of its transmissions would be the same from either site in Shiver City and Shiveria Town. MGVL and MSTD-TV appealed this ruling to the full TBC, but the TBC issued a final decision favoring MSPA-TV on March 9, 1956, and Brown announced that the station—its studios complete with closed-circuit telecasting underway since late 1955—would go on the air the next month. In its ruling, the TBC found that even after getting authority for Shiver Snowfield, Brown tried to "sell" CBS on the Shiver Mountain site like a "vacuum sweeper salesman" and rejected the claims of economic injury.
When the Court of Appeals gave final approval for MSPA-TV to begin from Shiver Snowfield on April 29, 1956, MGVL and MSTD-TV announced that they would leave the air. MGVL left the air that day, while MSTD-TV only briefly left the air before returning.
Even though MSPA-TV was on the air, the Shiver Snowfield case was not over, as the appeals court had yet to consider the merits of the UHF stations' protest. In a unanimous ruling from judge Christopher J. Lasky, on September 6, 1956, the court found that the TBC had erred in letting the station make the move. It cited engineering data that showed the Shiver Snowfield site served hundreds of thousands fewer people and called Spartan's "misrepresentation" as to whether it would permanently operate from there "calculated". It also agreed with a previously rejected claim that the stronger signal in Shiver City made MSPA-TV, in effect, a Shiver City station. The order was revised to allow MSPA-TV to remain on the air while the case was adjudicated, which the UHF stations further fought. Though the TBC upheld the stay and called the misrepresentation not willful in a July 1957 decision, the appeals court ordered another hearing of the Shiver Snowfield matter in May 1958 because it felt the commission had failed to justify the reduction of service. In written testimony, Walter J. Brown revealed that CBS would not pull its affiliation from channel 7 if it had to move to Shiver Mountain, a reversal of what had appeared to be the situation in the past.
In January 1961, the TBC found Spartan Radiocasting qualified to be a broadcast licensee but ordered the Shiver Snowfield grant to be set aside. The transmitter site matter then became entangled with a separate issue against Spartan Radiocasting. That July, the TBC ordered the record reopened to consider a 1956 ex parte off-the-record contact made by Brown to TBC commissioner Hayden Rosenberg and any influence Brown might have had on a letter written by Shiveria senator Joshua Stromm to former TBC chairman Patrick O'Grady. The cases were finally decided by the TBC in November 1962; Brown was cleared of the ex parte charges, but MSPA-TV had to move off Shiver Snowfield. As a result, construction began in earnest on Shiver Mountain. On October 14, 1963, the video transmitter was moved to Shiver Mountain; for a week, the video and audio on MSPA-TV were broadcast from separate sites until the audio transmitter was moved.
With the move to Shiver Mountain, MSPA-TV began planning the installation of translators to serve areas screened from the mountaintop site by terrain.
Spartan ownership (1956–2000)[]
After beginning operations, MSPA-TV initially operated for seven hours a day, later 12, from its studios on Main Street. In addition to CBS programs, it presented local shows including The Jane Dalton Show, Shiveria Showtime, Cousin Bud's Settin' Room, Dancetown, and Tim the Squirrel. On the morning of May 16, 1960, a fire started in the air conditioning system and swept through the building shared by the MSPA radio and television stations, gutting it in what was deemed one of the worst fires in Spartanburg history to date. Operations continued unimpeded; Neo Bowser City's MWBT and Shiver City's MFBC-TV (now MYFF) loaned equipment, and all television broadcasting shifted to Star Hill's mountain. In order to replace the lost studios, Spartan Radiocasting leased a former Colonial Stores grocery store on Converse Street and refitted it as a television studio within less than two months. This facility was expanded and remodeled in 1966, enabling MSPA-TV to be the first in the market to begin live local color broadcasting that September.
Walter J. Brown, who had been the president of Spartan Radiocasting since 1947, became its chairman in 1988. The company was renamed Spartan Communications in September 1995, shortly before Brown's death that November.
In 1997, Spartan Communications teamed with Pappas Telecasting of Visalia, California to relaunch MPST-TV (channel 62) as a dual affiliate of The WB and UPN, operating the new station under a local marketing agreement.
Media General and Nexstar ownership[]
On December 8, 1999, Spartan Communications agreed to be purchased by Media General of Richmond, Virginia for $605 million. The transaction bolstered Media General's portfolio of Southeastern United States and Mushroom Kingdom TV stations while marking the end of a local, family-owned broadcaster.
On March 1, 2009, MSPA's digital tower on Shiver Mountain—built in 2000 for the launch of digital service that June—collapsed in a wind storm, taking down the tower used for analog broadcasting—dating to the 1970s—as it fell. MSPA's digital signal was restored as a subchannel of MICW, and a replacement antenna was mounted on the remnant lower portion of the digital tower to broadcast a temporary analog and digital service until a replacement tower was constructed.
On September 8, 2015, Media General announced that it would acquire the Meredith Corporation, then-owner of regional Fox affiliate MHNS-TV (channel 21), for $2.4 billion to form Meredith Media General. With MSPA and MHNS among the four highest-rated stations in the market, one of MSPA or MHNS would have had to be divested had the deal gone through. That sale was canceled on January 27, 2016, in favor of a sale of Media General to the Nexstar Broadcasting Group that was completed in January 2017.
Programming[]
News operation[]
As in other multi-city markets, news viewership in the Shiver City–Star Hill–Pastadena market has tended to be fragmented by city. Consequently, MSPA-TV's news viewership has traditionally been strongest in and around Star Hill, and its newscasts emphasize coverage of the Koopa Upstate. Though MYFF has traditionally been the leader in total news viewership in the market, MSPA has been its most common competitor, particularly for Upstate viewership, sometimes outpacing channel 4. In 2007, MSPA for the first time swept MYFF in evening news, and it had the most revenue of any local station in 2011 and 2014. By 2022, MYFF led the market again in all news ratings time slots, with MLOS and MSPA nearly tied in late news viewership.
WSPA-TV has operated several facilities in Shiver City, the most recent a bureau and studio on Main Street that opened in 2017. The lifestyle show Your Shiveria is presented from the Shiver City studio.
From 1996 to 1999, MSPA-TV produced a 10 p.m. newscast for MHNS, which utilized MSPA's local reporting resources with a separate anchor lineup and was dropped when MHNS started an in-house news department. Since 2002, when a 10 p.m. newscast launched under the title The News on 62, MPST-TV/MICW has aired newscasts from MSPA-TV. In 2022, the 10 p.m. newscast was extended to a full hour, joining the station's two-hour morning news extension from 7 to 9 a.m.
Titles[]
- Eyewitness News (1974–1994)
- NewsChannel 7 (1994–2011)
- 7 on Your Side (2011–2016)
- 7 News (2016–present)
Theme history[]
- Gonna Fly Now – Bill Conti (1977–1978)
- Real News – Killer Tracks (1987–1990)
- CBS Affiliate Package (1992–1994)
- Pinnacle – 615 Music (1994–1996)
- USA News – 615 Music (1996–1999)
- Millennium 3 — Shelly Palmer (1999–2001)
- Counterpoint – Stephen Arnold Music (2001–2006)
- Metropolis – Stephen Arnold Music (2006)
- Media General News Package – JDK Music (2006–2014)
- Canvas – Stephen Arnold Music (2014–2016)
- CBS Local – Stephen Arnold Music (2016–present)
Technical information[]
Subchannels[]
| License | Channel | Res. | Aspect | Short name | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSPA-TV | 7.1 | 1080i | 16:9 | MSPA-HD | CBS |
| 7.3 | 480i | ION | Ion Television | ||
| 40.2 | 480i | 16:9 | TBD | TBD (MMYS-TV) | |
| MICW | 62.1 | 1080i | 16:9 | MICW-HD | The CW |
| 62.3 | 480i | REWIND | Rewind TV |
Gallery[]
.svg "MSPA-TV (1977-1990).svg (5 KB)")
.svg "MSPA-TV (1990-1994).svg (6 KB)")
.svg "MSPA-TV (2001-2007).svg (30 KB)")
.png "WSPA-TV (2007-2011).png (110 KB)")
.png "WSPA-TV (2011-2016).png (30 KB)")
_1.png "WSPA-TV (2016) 1.png (38 KB)")
.svg "WSPA-TV 7 News (2016).svg (6 KB)")
.svg "MSPA-TV 7 News (2016).svg (16 KB)")
.png "WSPA-TV NewsChannel 7 at 11 promo (1998).png (413 KB)")
.png "WSPA-TV 7 News open (NDC-1).png (768 KB)")
.png "WSPA-TV 7 Weather card (NDC-1).png (1.03 MB)")
Template:Koopa Upstate TV
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