City Shreveport, Louisiana Frequency 710 kHz Format News Talk Information | Slogan Newsradio 710 (Keel) First air date June 26, 1922 | |
Broadcast area Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area | ||
KEEL (710 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a News Talk Information format. Licensed to Shreveport, Louisiana, United States, the station serves the Shreveport area. The station is currently owned by Townsquare Media and features programming from ABC Radio and airs Louisiana Tech games. Its studios are shared with its other five sister stations in West Shreveport (one mile west of Shreveport Regional Airport), and the transmitter is in Mooringsport, Louisiana.
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Among the KEEL programs are the statewide The Moon Griffon Show and the nationally carried Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Andy Dean. C.L. Bryant, an African-American conservative, also broadcasts from KEEL from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. nightly.
Bob Griffin, former KSLA broadcast journalist and sports anchor, hosts a Christian weekly half-hour program, The Bob Griffin Radio Show, which is aired from KEEL and also carried on four stations in East Texas: KGAS (AM) in Carthage, KMHT (AM) in Marshall, KWRD (AM) in Henderson, and KPXI in Overton, which serves Tyler and Longview. The program consists of travel reports, features, area personalities, and uplifting human interest stories, often with Christian testimonies. At 6:50 a.m. CST weekdays on KEEL, he airs a minute-long feature, "People to Meet, Places to Go, and Things to See and Do".
Marie Gifford Wright
A native of Cordell in Washita County in western Oklahoma, Marie Gifford (1917–2004), later Marie Wright, launched a career in radio in the 1940s in Oklahoma City. In 1945, she relocated to Shreveport and became the first woman manager of a local radio station. In 1962, she was named general manager of KEEL and KMBQ stations. From 1965 to 1975, she was vice president of LIN Broadcasting; when the company became the expanded and reorganized Multi-Media Broadcasting, with newspaper and television holdings as well as radio, Gifford continued in the vice presidency from 1975 to 1980.
In 1970, Gifford became the first woman to run for mayor of Shreveport on a platform of downtown revitalization and civil rights. She was defeated in the Democratic primary by municipal utilities commissioner Calhoun Allen, who then prevailed in the general election over the Republican mayoral choice, Edward Leo "Ed" McGuire, Jr. (1914–1983), a Massachusetts native and a member of the Caddo Parish School Board.
In 1988, Wright was named recipient of the "Women Who Have Made a Difference" award. Former State Senator Virginia Shehee, who served with Wright on the boards of the Shreveport Symphony and the Strand Theatre, said that Wright's fight for equality had a major impact in Shreveport.
In 1979, Gifford married Harold Arthur Wright (1907–2012), an entrepreneur originally from Moultrie County in central Illinois, who owned the former Whatleys, Wills, and Wright appliance centers in Shreveport, Monroe, and Jackson, Mississippi.
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History
As KTBS, the station joined NBC's Southwest group February 28, 1932, becoming the 88th station affiliated with NBC. At that time, KTBS was owned by Tristate Broadcasting System Inc. and broadcast on 1450 kHz with 1 KW power.