In recent months, KPIX apparently switched some of their newscast themes from Gari Media’s Enforcer collection (hence the pun in the title) to a Stephen Arnold Music’s CBS Local. Both themes share signature notes, that note dating back to the mid 1970s from a WBBM-TV theme, that became a so-called de-facto standard across the then five CBS O&O stations.

CBS Local is based on the O&O themes (there has been many derivatives over the years, for the sister stations, affiliates, or one-off stations.) For case of SAM, I believe the original client was Nexstar for the theme of their chain of CBS affiliates, with an O&O sound to it. It’s doesn’t sound that bad coming from the least-known, most heard music in domestic broadcast and cable.

It’s highly ironic that a CBS O&O would actually go out of their corporate theme (since CBS now owns more than 20). This maybe because KPIX had SAM compose a “sonic brand” for their 70th anniversary in 2018.

Again, I am not a California boy, or anything like that, it’s rather interesting that CBS allowed a station to go outside their approved music, which is basically The Enforcer. I wouldn’t hold my breath. As ViacomCBS is becoming Paramount, despite a corporate parent company name change, ViacomCBS has pushed a very unified look and feel for all the network divisions, and pushed some uniform branding on the CBSN local stations. I wouldn’t be shocked if this were to occur, though I think in the long run, any type branding of that nature may degrade decades old branding stations like KPIX or NBC’s WTVJ spent on.

On an unrelated note, I came across a 2018 The One 4 All promo well known at WBZ-TV, and let me tell you, that was more cringy. I’ll leave that to another day.