Arizona's Family (3TV / CBS5)

What you're reading

Arizona's Family is the combined news brand of two Phoenix television stations — KPHO-TV (CBS 5, on the air since 1955) and KTVK (3TV, since 1955 as an ABC affiliate, now independent). The stations operate jointly under Gray Media (formerly Gray Television), the Atlanta-based broadcast group that acquired the Meredith Corporation local-TV portfolio in 2021, bringing both stations under common ownership.

The combined newsroom produces several hours of local newscasts daily across both stations, plus 24-hour weather coverage on a dedicated cable subchannel, the AZFamily streaming app, and the Arizona's Family website. Coverage centers on Phoenix-area news — local government, schools, monsoon and extreme-heat weather (a signature beat in a metro that regularly sets US heat records), public safety, traffic, immigration along the border, and Phoenix Suns, Diamondbacks, and Cardinals sports. Audience reach is metro-Phoenix mass-market — one of the largest local-TV news operations in the Southwest.

Ownership & funding

Gray Media. Funded primarily through ad-supported.

Ad-supported broadcast economics push the newsroom hard toward stories that drive ratings — extreme weather, traffic and crashes, crime blotter, missing persons, viral local-interest stories, and sports. Political coverage gets less airtime than at print outlets because political stories don't carry the same broadcast-audience pull. Gray Media is a publicly traded broadcast group operating roughly 180 stations nationwide, which creates real cost-control pressure across the chain and shared corporate-services models. Gray has historically run more conservative-leaning national content packages than rival Sinclair, but at the station level the news produced is locally controlled. Affiliate revenue plus retransmission-consent fees supplement traditional spot advertising.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Arizona's Family (3TV / CBS5) at Center with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

Arizona's Family sits at Center because the news product is functionally apolitical for most of any given broadcast. Weather, traffic, crime blotter, school news, sports, and human-interest stories dominate the lineup, and on those beats partisan framing barely applies. When the newsroom covers Arizona politics — legislative sessions, gubernatorial press conferences, Maricopa County election administration, ballot-initiative campaigns — coverage is descriptive and quote-driven rather than analytical, reporting what officials said with right-of-reply built in. Border-and-immigration coverage runs in a similarly factual register, emphasizing local impact (Border Patrol activity, migrant arrivals at Phoenix shelters) rather than national-political framing.

The pattern leans modestly liberal on a few social issues — coverage of reproductive-care access and LGBTQ stories trends sympathetic to affected residents — but the broadcast format constrains framing in ways print does not. Factuality sits at Mostly Factual rather than High because the fast-turn broadcast news pipeline produces occasional errors on breaking-news stories that get corrected on air the next cycle. The investigative team produces solid accountability work, and the station maintains conventional broadcast standards (named sources, recorded interviews, on-air corrections), but the editorial bandwidth for deep verification is lower than at print outlets with comparable reach.

Editorial vs news side

Arizona's Family does not run an editorial board, opinion segments, or political endorsements. The product is reported broadcast news, weather, traffic, and sports — no labeled opinion programming, no signed-column equivalent. Anchor commentary is limited to brief sign-offs and human-interest framing. That structure makes the Center rating apply cleanly to the whole news operation; there's no opinion track to evaluate separately. The closest thing to perspective content is the "On Your Side" consumer-affairs and investigative segments, which advocate for viewers in disputes with businesses and government but don't take ideological positions. The product is news-only by format.

Why we include them in nwsly

Phoenix CBS/3TV affiliate; straightforward local broadcast news.

Phoenix is the fifth-largest US city and one of the country's fastest-growing metros, but its civic-affairs media coverage is thinner than that scale would suggest. Arizona's Family fills the broadcast-news slot for ground-level Phoenix-area reporting — extreme-heat impact, border-and-immigration developments, Maricopa County election operations on election nights, weather emergencies — that print outlets cover later or at a different register. nwsly uses it for visual and on-the-scene reporting that other Phoenix-area sources can't match, especially during the summer heat-dome cycles and election-administration news days when broadcast resources show up first.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Arizona's Family (3TV / CBS5)

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