Palmer owner of the Texarkana Gazette and several other newspapers and radio stations across Arkansas and Texas and his son-in-law Walter E. Hussman, Sr. The group subsequently requested and received approval to assign KCMC-TV as the television station's call letters, using the base callsign that had been used by Camden News Publishing's Texarkana radio station on AM since it signed on in and applied to its radio sister on Channel 6 was the first television station to sign on in the Shreveport—Texarkana market and the first such station to be licensed to a city outside of Shreveport; it is also the only full-power television station in the Shreveport—Texarkana Designated Market Area that is licensed to a municipality not within the Louisiana portion of the market.
In May , the station's transmitter power output was increased to , watts. Station advertisements did not include Caddo Parish as being part of KCMC's viewing area, even though its designated area included the neighboring Louisiana parishes of Bossier , Webster and Claiborne and the neighboring Texas counties of Cass , Marion and Harrison.
CBS grew frustrated with having to maintain affiliations with two stations to carry its programming in an otherwise effectively consolidated market. KCMC-TV was faced with the prospect of having to fall back on its secondary affiliation with the then-weak ABC which would not gain a major foothold in the Nielsen ratings nationally until the latter part of the s or become an independent station —neither of which was a viable option for such a small market.
Hussman thus persuaded the FCC to formally collapse Texarkana and Shreveport into a single television market. The Vivian broadcast tower—which, at 1, feet m , became the second-tallest transmission tower in the Southern United States at that time—was activated on May 1, The transmitter allowed the station to extended its signal deeper into parts of northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas that previously could not receive the station either adequately or at all as well as increasing its city-grade coverage deeper into the Shreveport area and extending up to 45 miles 72 km to the south of the city.
On that date, the station's call letters were changed to KTAL-TV, which served as both a reference to channel 6's three-state service area—Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana—and to its new transmission tower.
