KWTV-DT - History

History

The idea to create the station came about as local grocery magnate John T. Griffin noticed that many homes around the Oklahoma City area had outdoor television antennas in order to receive WKY-TV (channel 4), Oklahoma's first television station, that debuted in June 1949, leading to Griffin's decision to expand into television and apply for a broadcast station license with the Federal Communications Commission. KWTV first signed on the air on December 20, 1953, founded by Griffin and his brother-in-law Jimmy Leake, owners of KOMA (1520 AM), initially broadcasting from a shorter temporary tower near the KWTV studios on Kelley Avenue as its permanent transmitter tower was still under construction. The station has been a CBS affiliate since its sign-on, owing to KOMA's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network, and is one of the few television stations in the United States that has had the same callsign, ownership, primary network affiliation and over-the-air channel allocation throughout its history. The first program broadcast on KWTV featured station employees introducing themselves and the departments of the station they were employed at.

The Griffins chose to name the station KWTV (for "World's Tallest Video") after the 1,577 feet (481 m) tower (which was the tallest free-standing broadcast tower in the world at the time and was activated in 1954), over using the KOMA calls used by its sister radio station. Todd Storz, creator of the Top 40 radio format, purchased KOMA in 1958, separating it from KWTV. Griffin and Leake bought out the partners that held minority interest in the station in 1963; Leake then sold his interest to Griffin in 1968, in return for Griffin's share of two other television stations: KTUL/Tulsa and KATV/Little Rock. By the 1970s, KWTV became the first station in the market to begin recording news footage on videotape instead of film. In the late 1970s, it also became the market's first television station to operate on a 24-hour programming schedule. Griffin retired in 1990, and turned over control of the station to his son David.

On August 18, 1993, KWTV partnered with Cox Communications and Multimedia Cablevision to create a new 24-hour locally-operated cable news channel through a condition of a retransmission consent agreement that Griffin Television renewed with the two cable providers. This channel debuted on December 3, 1996 as News Now 53, available in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area on Cox cable channel 53, and featured rebroadcasts and live simulcasts of KWTV's news programming (News Now 53 was initially seen only in the city proper, before its carriage expanded to Oklahoma City's outlying suburbs following Cox's January 2000 acquisition of Multimedia Cablevision from the Gannett Company), the channel later expanded to the Tulsa market after Griffin Communications purchased that city's CBS affiliate KOTV in 2000 with that station's newscasts being shown on Cox's systems in that area also on channel 53 (Cox Communications acquired TCI's Tulsa service area one year earlier during that company's merger with AT&T Corporation).

Tragedy struck the station on January 26, 2001, when a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 transporting nine members of Oklahoma State University's basketball team (including two players and six coaching staff members) and KWTV sports director Bill Teegins (who also served as a radio announcer for the university's football and basketball games) crashed in a field near Strasburg, Colorado. The plane departed from Jefferson County Airport following a game against the University of Colorado Buffaloes, when the pilot became disoriented while flying through heavy snow on the way to Stillwater Regional Airport; all ten men on board were killed (two memorials have since been erected in remembrance: one at the crash site, and another on the Stillwater campus of OSU outside Gallagher-Iba Arena featuring a statue of a kneeling cowboy).

That same year, KWTV entered into a content partnership with The Oklahoman that resulted in the merger of both their websites in 2001, under the "NewsOK" brand; this collaboration ended in early 2008 (though the NewsOK website continues to exist as the website for The Oklahoman). Ironically the Gaylord family, who ran the newspaper from 1907 to 2011 (when the paper's owner OPUBCO Communications Group was sold to The Anschutz Corporation), built and signed on competitor KFOR-TV in 1949, retaining ownership of that station until 1976.

On October 25, 2010, KWTV became the Oklahoma City market's first television station (and Oklahoma's fifth, the others before then being Tulsa stations: KJRH-TV, KTUL and KWTV sister stations KOTV and KQCW-DT) to carry syndicated programming in high definition, as well as the first in the market to run traditional advertisements and promos produced by the station and its affiliated network during local commercial breaks in the format.