So You Want To Dig Into Brant Hively's Career
I ran into this around 2018 when someone in a local media history Discord mentioned Brant Hively had done both morning drive radio and local TV production in the Pacific Northwest. At first I dismissed it as another case of mistaken identity. Turns out the person was right, and tracing his path through dead stations and lost reels is one of those oddly satisfying exercises if you actually put in the work. The problem with most research on people like Hively is that their credits are scattered across formats that nobody maintains anymore. I spent about three weeks early last year trying to pin down a full timeline. What I learned was that the standard approach of just searching broadcast databases doesn't work because he shifted between radio and television during periods where many stations didn't properly archive their staff rosters. You need to start with the Federal Communications Commission's LMS database, but not just by name. Search by call letters of stations he was connected to, then cross-reference with the station's FCC applications. Hively's early radio work shows up in Salt Lake City area stations around the mid-1990s, and the FCC files there contain on-air personality disclosures that most people don't think to check. I found two separate instances where the FCC paperwork listed him as a program director or operations manager when a simple name search turned up nothing at all.
For the television side, the trail gets thinner. Local TV stations in that era rarely kept detailed employment records online. The workaround I used was digging into public inspection files for KSL-TV and KTVX in Salt Lake City, then checking the FCC licensing documents for each station's ownership changes. Hively appears in production credits on a few local public affairs programs from around 1998 to 2003, but the exact dates are fuzzy because the shows were low-budget cable or over-the-air access productions with minimal centralized archiving. One thing that trips up a lot of people is assuming that being credited in a station's public file means the person was a regular employee. Sometimes those credits are for guest appearances, one-off segments, or volunteer work. I initially recorded several entries where Hively was only a occasional contributor, which inflated his apparent prominence. I had to go back and verify with actual station yearbooks and local newspaper media sections before adjusting the timeline. The Deseret News archives from that period were actually the most reliable source I found, even though the subscription wall makes it annoying to access. Here is a practical step-by-step if you want to do this yourself:
First, pull the FCC LMS database and search for any call letters associated with Hively's name across Utah and Idaho. Download the full application packages, not just the summaries. Those PDFs often contain staffing lists that never made it online. Second, search the Library of Congress's Chronicling America database for any mentions of Brant Hively in Utah newspapers from 1993 to 2005. I found three articles that placed him at specific stations during specific years. One mentioned him covering a local government hearing for a radio segment, which confirmed he was doing on-location reporting work beyond just studio hosting. Third, hit up the university archives. The University of Utah's L. Tom Perry Special Collections has some broadcast media materials that include staff listings from the era. I contacted their reference desk directly, and they pointed me to a box of tape logs that listed Hively's name on several production schedules from 1996 to 1999. This kind of material doesn't show up in any digital search.
Get the Full Details
The radio portion of his career is better documented than the TV work. He appears to have been primarily a morning drive host and a program coordinator, working across both AM and FM outlets. The transition from radio to television production seems to have happened organically rather than through formal training, which was common in smaller markets where people just did whatever the station needed. What most casual researchers miss is that "legend" is a generous term here. Hively wasn't nationally syndicated or anything close to that. He was a solid working professional in a medium market who moved between roles as opportunities came up. The reason his name surfaces occasionally is that he was present during a period when local broadcast media in the Intermountain West was still doing substantial original programming before consolidation started eating away at those operations. That context matters more than the individual credits. If you are tracking down physical materials, don't expect to find much in official channels. Most of the tape logs and production schedules I referenced were accessible only through archive requests or direct contact with institution staff. A few personal recollections showed up on old Usenet archives and early forum posts from people who worked alongside him, but those require specialized search skills to locate since they aren't indexed by mainstream engines.
The biggest dead end I hit was trying to verify his later career after 2005. No FCC filings, no newspaper mentions, no professional social media presence. At that point the record just stops. There are unconfirmed references to him moving into behind-the-scenes production work, possibly in education or corporate video, but nothing that can be verified through public sources. I tried reaching out to a couple of former station managers through LinkedIn without getting a response, which isn't unusual for people who have left the industry entirely. What I can say with some confidence is that Brant Hively had a genuine if modest career in broadcast media spanning roughly a decade in Utah and Idaho, working in both radio and television without ever crossing into national visibility. The research process itself teaches you how fragmented local media history actually is, which is probably the more useful takeaway than any specific detail about the man himself. For anyone else pursuing this kind of project, my recommendation is to budget more time than you think you need and to be prepared for most of your questions to hit a wall. The pieces that exist are real, but they are scattered across physical archives, obscure databases, and the memories of people who may or may not respond to you. Start with the FCC filings, move to newspaper archives, and then dig into institutional records. In that order, the results get progressively harder to find.
