KVIA
U.S. local-news, no consistent national ideological bent
Background
KVIA traces its roots to KILT-TV, which signed on in El Paso on September 1, 1956, co-founded by broadcaster Gordon McLendon. The station changed hands and call signs several times over the following decades — becoming KELP-TV in the late 1950s, then adopting the KVIA-TV call letters in 1976 under the Marsh family — before swapping channel positions with public station KCOS in 1981 to move to channel 7. News-Press & Gazette Company, a privately held, family-run media firm founded in 1951 and based in St. Joseph, Missouri, purchased KVIA in January 1995, and it has remained under NPG ownership since. NPG's portfolio includes newspapers and TV/radio stations across Missouri, Kansas, California, Idaho, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas. As a longtime ABC affiliate, KVIA carries network programming alongside locally produced newscasts, and like most local affiliates, it has not developed a national reputation for partisan slant; its journalism is generally assessed as straightforward local reporting rather than ideologically driven commentary. It operates in a competitive four-station market in El Paso alongside NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates.
Sources
Profile compiled 2026-09-30; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.