KESQ’s History In The Coachella Valley
According to records kept by the Federal Communications Commission, KESQ-TV is one of the oldest television stations in the Palm Springs area.
KESQ-TV first went on air as KPLM-TV in 1968. KPLM-TV was named for the “Palm” as in “Palm Springs,” and it changed call letters in late 1979 to KESQ-TV under ownership of Esquire Communications, owner of Esquire Magazine.
In the years before purchasing KESQ, the magazine helped pioneer the historical trend of New Journalism by publishing such writers as Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, John Sack, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Terry Southern.
Soon afterward, KESQ-TV began to air a nightly newscast in the mid 1980s and had its call signs above a tri-color “red-blue-yellow” rainbow logo, until it was replaced by a golden “3” in 1994/95, which is the logo we still use today.
KESQ-TV covers a wide area of the Low Desert of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, covering the cities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Indio, Coachella, Mecca, Thermal and many more in the high desert.
We reach even farther with translators in Hemet/San Jacinto (K82HQ), Banning/Beaumont (K33BL) and Blythe (K71AB).
KESQ-TV owns the license for KESQ (AM) 1400kHz of Indio, which is leased to a local church. The station shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, the date of the digital television transition
