KQED

History

KQED was organized and founded by veteran broadcast journalists James Day and Jonathan Rice on June 1, 1953, and first signed on the air on April 5, 1954, as the fourth television station in the San Francisco Bay Area and the sixth public television station in the United States, debuting shortly after the launch of WQED in Pittsburgh. The station's call letters, Q.E.D., are taken from the Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum, commonly used in mathematics. The station was originally licensed to Berkeley, but changed its city of license to San Francisco on July 24, 1956.

In its early days following the station's sign-on, KQED broadcast only twice a week for one hour each day. Despite the very limited schedule, the station was still losing money, leading to a decision in early 1955 from its board of trustees to close down the station. Its staff got the board to keep the station on the air and tried to get needed funds from the public in a form of a televised auction, in which celebrities would appear to auction off goods and services donated to the station. While the station still came a little short, it did show that the general public cared to keep KQED on the air. Since then, the auction became a fund-raising tool for many public television stations, though its usage waned in recent years in favor of increased usage of special pledge drives throughout the year.

In 1970, KQED inherited KNEW-TV (channel 32) from Metromedia and changed the station's call letters to KQEC, but found they could not operate it without losing money. Various PBS and locally produced programs from KQED would air erratically and at different times of the day on KQEC. In 1988, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoked KQED's license to operate KQEC, citing excessive off-air time, further charging dishonesty in previous filings with regard to the specific reasons. The alleged dishonesty was in reference to KQED's claim of financial woes for keeping KQEC off the air for most of 1972 through 1977, and again for several months in 1979 and 1980. After being revoked from KQED's hands, the reassigned license was granted to the Minority Television Project (MTP), one of the challengers of the KQED/KQEC filing. The KQEC call letters were changed to KMTP-TV under the new license.

During the early 1990s, when the state of California reintroduced the death penalty, the KQED organization waged a legal battle for the right to televise the forthcoming execution of Robert Alton Harris at San Quentin State Prison. The decision to pursue the videotaping of executions was controversial among those on both sides of the capital punishment debate.

KQED was co-producer of the television adaptation of Armistead Maupin's novel Tales of the City, which aired on PBS stations nationwide in January 1994. The original six-part series was produced by Britain's public-service Channel Four Television Corporation with KQED and PBS' American Playhouse. The series featured gay themes, nudity, and illicit drug use in this fictional portrayal of life in 1970s San Francisco. Although the program gave PBS its highest ratings ever for a dramatic program, PBS bowed to threats of federal funding cuts and announced it would not participate in the television production of an adaptation of the second book in the series, More Tales of the City. The film division of KQED was founded by Irving Saraf.

With financial constraints looming, KQED announced in June 1995 that it would begin showing 30-second advertisements from corporate sponsors the following month.

The station started a school-age channel using some PBS Kids shows and syndicated shows such as The Zula Patrol and Wunderkind Little Amadeus in 2005. KQED also became a PBS Kids Sprout partner, which gave the station goodwill to get carriage on Comcast's systems.

On May 1, 2006, KQED and the KTEH Foundation agreed to merge to form Northern California Public Broadcasting. While broadcasting its own kids channel, the station intended to pick up the planned PBS Kids Go! channel when launched in April 2006. However, the PBS Kids Go! channel was canceled in July 2006 before broadcasting. Since the two stations shared a market and public TV's digital carriage agreement with top cable operators required differentiation of the stations' services, PBS Kids Go! was a way to do so.

KQED-TV produced regularly scheduled news programming from 1963 to 2023 on television.

One of KQED's early local programs was World Press, an hour-long weekly roundup of international news stories analyzed by a panel of political analysts, which debuted in 1963. Panel members, who were political science analysts specializing in each specific global area, each brought a newspaper for round table discussion. It was developed by San Francisco Supervisor Roger Boas, who brought his long-term interest in government, politics, television, and business to the show. The program "summed up the foreign reaction to such events as the Kennedy assassinations, the Vietnam War, along with thousands of other events that have shaped the decade of the sixties." What started as a local public access program with no financial support became the longest continuously running discussion program televised on approximately 185 stations.

KQED was best known from the late 1960s through the 1970s for the first nightly news program on public television in the country. During a nine-week-long newspaper strike in 1968, KQED launched Newspaper of the Air, paying striking reporters $100 per week to report on a major story for the show. After the strike ended, the show was relaunched as Newsroom with the help of Fred W. Friendly and a $750,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. For many years, Newsroom was originally anchored by veteran journalist Mel Wax, then by Belva Davis, a pioneering African-American broadcaster. In 1980, the nightly news broadcast was canceled, citing rising costs. It was replaced by a documentary production unit, which thrived for over a decade, producing a series of local documentaries and some major national productions, including two Peabody Award winners, Broken Arrow: Can a Nuclear Weapons Accident Happen Here? (1980–81) and The Case of Dashiell Hammett (1982). The staff also regularly produced feature news stories for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, which was influenced by Newsroom.

Davis continued to host a weekly news program, This Week in Northern California, until her retirement on November 9, 2012. The following year, the program was relaunched as KQED Newsroom, named after the pioneering 1960s show, with Thuy Vu as host on October 18, 2013 (two months after Vu became the host of This Week in Northern California). After Vu left on June 21, 2019, Priya David Clemens became host on February 28, 2020, until the series finale of the program. KQED Newsroom aired its last episode, the second of a two-part retrospective on the station's news operation, on June 23, 2023. KQED Inc. continues to air news and public affairs programming on KQED 88.5 FM, online, and social media platforms.