KCTV

The station first signed on the air on September 27, 1953 as KCMO-TV (for Kansas City, MissOuri). Founded by the KCMO Broadcasting Corporation, owners of radio stations KCMO (then at 810 AM, now at 710 AM) and KCMO-FM (94.9), from which the television station acquired its original call letters. It originally served as an affiliate of ABC, which had been affiliated with WDAF-TV (channel 4) on a part-time basis since that station signed on as the Kansas City market's first television station in October 1949. KCMO-TV originally operated from studio facilities located on East 31st Street in Kansas City, Missouri's Union Hill neighborhood. On October 2, six days after channel 5 made its debut, Meredith Engineering purchased the KCMO radio and television stations from KCMO Broadcasting; the sale was completed less than two months later in December 1953.[5]

When DuMont Television Network owned-and-operated UHF affiliate KCTY went off the air on February 28, 1954, KCMO-TV acquired DuMont as a secondary affiliation.[6] In January 1955, Meredith signed a multi-year agreement with CBS to affiliate five of the television stations that the former owned at the time with the network. As part of the deal, Meredith agreed to affiliate KCMO-TV with CBS, as compensation for sister station KPHO-TV in Phoenix, Arizona losing its affiliation with the network (KPHO became an independent station after CBS moved its programming to KOOL-TV (now Fox owned-and-operated station KSAZ-TV), from which it would re-assume the network's Phoenix affiliation 39 years later in December 1994). CBS moved its Kansas City affiliation to channel 5 from KMBC-TV (channel 9) in September of that year;[7] KMBC, meanwhile, would assume the local rights to the ABC affiliation.

While it changed its primary network affiliation, KCMO-TV remained a secondary affiliate of DuMont; it would disaffiliate from that network when it ceased operations on August 6, 1956, resulting in CBS becoming the station's sole network affiliation. For most of its first decade on the air, KCMO-TV branded on-air as "Television 5"; subsequently in 1966, the station's branding was simplified to "TV 5", a moniker which remained in use until the callsign change to KCTV in 1983 (around the time the latter brand was first adopted, it also began using a logo similar to that used at that period by NBC-affiliated sister station WNEM-TV in Bay City, Michigan).

Meredith sold the KCMO radio stations to Richard Fairbanks in 1983, but retained ownership of KCMO-TV. On March 7 of that year, per a since-repealed FCC rule that forbade TV and radio stations in the same market but with different owners from sharing the same callsign, the company changed the station's call letters to KCTV (standing for Kansas City's TeleVision, which also served as the station's on-air slogan from that year on until February 1994), based on the familiarity of the "TV 5" branding. It also relocated its operations across the Missouri-Kansas state line from its original studio facilities on East 31st Street to a new facility on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas. The station's original studio building in Union Hill now houses the offices and production facilities of PBS member station KCPT (channel 19), although KCTV's transmitter antenna continues to operate from an adjacent tower located on the studio grounds (see below). The "TV 5" branding that had gradually been phased out from on-air usage following the callsign changeover in favor of the "KCTV 5" moniker was discontinued completely in 1990; however, KCTV's logo has continued to subtly reference the now-defunct brand, by changing the font of the "TV" lettering (as done from 1990 to 1999), rendering the "TV" lettering in bold type (as done from 1999 to 2002) or connecting the "T" and "V" (as done from 2002 to 2011 and again since 2020).

KCTV logo, used from November 2011 to October 2015; the logo on which it is based was first introduced in May 2002.

On May 23, 1994, New World Communications signed a long-term affiliation and financing agreement with News Corporation, in which New World agreed to switch the network affiliations of five of its seven existing television stations and eight additional stations that the company was in the process of acquiring through separate deals with Great American Communications and Argyle Television Holdings (the latter of which sold its four stations to New World in a purchase option-structured deal on May 26 for $717 million) to Fox, in exchange for allowing News Corporation to acquire a 20% equity interest in the group. The stations involved in the agreement – which was motivated by the December 18, 1993 announcement that the National Football League (NFL) would award the rights to the National Football Conference television package to Fox effective with the 1994 season, ending the NFC's 38-year relationship with CBS – would disaffiliate from either of the three major broadcast networks (CBS, ABC and NBC) and join Fox once individual affiliation contracts with their existing respective network partners expired.[8][9][10] One of the stations involved in the deal was NBC affiliate WDAF-TV, which was among the four television stations that Great American Communications sold to New World – along with CBS affiliate KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, and ABC affiliates WBRC in Birmingham and WGHP in High Point, North Carolina – two weeks earlier on May 5 for $350 million in cash and $10 million in share warrants.[11][12][13]

KCTV logo, used from October 2015 to December 2020.

With Channel 4's contract with the network set to expire in five months, NBC quickly approached other area stations to replace WDAF-TV as its Kansas City affiliate. It first entered into discussions with KCTV management about becoming an NBC affiliate. The prospect of one of its strongest affiliates being courted by a rival Big Three network concerned CBS; New World planned to displace the network from stronger-performing VHF affiliates that the group had already owned or was in the process of purchasing in eight other markets to Fox, a situation that in most cases would force CBS to affiliate with either a former Fox affiliate or a lower-profile independent station. Many of the NBC- and ABC-affiliated stations and – with the exception of Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix – some higher-rated independents it approached for deals rejected CBS' offers to move its programming to those stations as the loss of NFL rights hampered its choices of replacement affiliates, exacerbating its existing problem of having a program slate that skewed towards an older audience than the other major broadcast networks that aided in CBS' ratings slide to third place nationally.

To prevent such a situation from happening in Kansas City, CBS negotiated a deal with Meredith executives conditional on agreeing to keep the CBS affiliation on channel 5, in which the company would agree to switch WNEM-TV and KPHO-TV to the network. Meredith and CBS would reach an agreement on the proposal on June 29, 1994.[14][15] With CBS staving off another affiliate defection in a New World market, NBC's choices for finding an affiliate to replace WDAF were narrowed further. KMBC-TV was in the middle of a long-term affiliation agreement between ABC and that station's owner, Hearst Broadcasting, leaving NBC's only viable option being soon-to-be-former Fox station KSHB-TV (channel 41), which – through its owner, Scripps-Howard Broadcasting – agreed to affiliate with the network on August 1, 1994; as a result, KSHB-TV and its Tulsa-based sister station KJRH-TV were not part of ABC's affiliation deal with its Cleveland and Detroit stations that caused three other stations to switch to that network.[16]

On November 12, 2004, Meredith purchased WB affiliate KSMO-TV (channel 62, now a MyNetworkTV affiliate) from the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group for $33.5 million ($26.8 million for the non-license assets and $6.7 million for the license itself). Under the terms of the deal, Meredith assumed responsibility for KSMO's advertising sales and administrative operations under a joint sales agreement that continued until the sale's closure. When the deal was finalized on September 29, 2005 through permission of a "failing station" waiver, KCTV and KSMO became the third television station duopoly in the Kansas City market (after KMBC and KCWE (channel 29), the latter of which Hearst purchased KCWE outright in 2001 but continued to operate under a local marketing agreement through an indirect subsidiary of the company for nine years after the company, and KSHB-TV and KMCI-TV (channel 38), the latter of which Scripps had purchased from Miller Television in 2002).[17][18][19][20][21] KSMO subsequently migrated its operations from its original studio facility in Kansas City, Kansas, into KCTV's Fairway studios following the transaction's completion.

On September 8, 2015, Richmond, Virginia-based Media General announced that it would acquire the Meredith Corporation for $2.4 billion, with the intention to name the combined group Meredith Media General once the sale was finalized. The sale would have marked the first change in ownership for the station since it was purchased by Meredith in 1953 and would have put KCTV and KSMO-TV under common ownership with Media General's existing virtual triopoly in the adjacent Topeka market between NBC affiliate KSNT, Fox affiliate KTMJ-CD and ABC affiliate KTKA-TV.[22][23][24][25][26] However, on September 28, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Broadcasting Group (now-former owner of ABC affiliate KQTV (channel 2) in St. Joseph) made an unsolicited cash-and-stock merger offer for Media General, originally valued at $14.50 per share.[27]

On November 16, following opposition to the merger with Meredith by minority shareholders Oppenheimer Holdings and Starboard Capital – primarily because Meredith's magazine properties were included in the deal, which would have re-entered Media General into publishing after it sold its newspapers to BH Media in 2012 to reduce debt – and the rejection of Nexstar's initial offer by company management, Media General agreed to enter into negotiations with Nexstar on a suitable counter deal, while the Meredith merger proposal remained active; the two eventually concluded negotiations on January 6, 2016, reaching a merger agreement for valued at $17.14 per share (an evaluation of $4.6 billion, plus the assumption of $2.3 billion in debt).[28] On January 27, Meredith formally broke off the proposed merger with Media General and accepted the termination fee of $60 million that was previously negotiated under the original merger proposal; Media General subsequently signed an agreement to be acquired by Nexstar (with the combined company to be known as Nexstar Media Group), in exchange for giving Meredith right of first refusal to acquire any broadcast or digital properties that may be divested.[29][30]

KCTV's transmitter tower on Union Hill.

KCTV maintains transmitter facilities on a 1,042-foot (318 m)[31] transmission tower located at its former studio facility on East 31st Street on Union Hill (south of downtown). At the time of its completion in 1956, the KCTV Tower was the third tallest freestanding structure in the world behind only the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.[32] The tower also briefly surpassed the height of the Eiffel Tower, which was originally 1,024 feet (312 m), to become the tallest tower in the world.[33][34] The Eiffel tower would regain the title of the tallest tower the following year by adding a broadcast aerial which increased its height to 1,052 feet (321 m).[35][36]

The KCTV tower has become a widely recognized Kansas City landmark, in large part because of the string lights that adorn the four corners of the structure's frame, which can be seen for miles around the immediate metropolitan area at night. It is so recognized that KCTV incorporated the "tall tower" – as the station referred to it on-air – into the logo it adopted as part of an imaging revamp in November 1999 (at which time, it also adopted the current KCTV 5 News identity as the title for its newscasts), which remained in use until May 2002. The tower itself is similar in structure to the 750-foot (228.6 m) transmission tower on which ABC affiliate KQTV upstate in St. Joseph (which, coincidentally, also began broadcasting on the date KCTV commenced operations, September 27, 1953) maintains its transmitter antenna.

From the 1970s until 2001, the tower also served as a weather beacon to signal residents and visitors of inclement weather affecting Kansas City and its immediate surrounding communities. For this purpose, station engineers switched individual sets of lights on the tower and moded them to flash when a severe weather watch or warning was issued for any county in the immediate Kansas City area by the local National Weather Service Forecast Office (based at what is now known as Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport when the KCTV tower began use as a weather beacon; the office moved to its present Pleasant Hill, Missouri facility in 1993) or the National Severe Storms Forecast Center/Storm Prediction Center, activating them in descending order – in one or more of three sections – in pertinence to the specific weather situation:

KCTV's transmitter tower as seen from the Liberty Memorial.

• Lights flashing on the top third of the tower indicated that a severe thunderstorm watch, tornado watch or winter weather advisory was in effect
• Lights flashing on the top two-thirds of the tower indicated that a severe thunderstorm warning or winter storm warning was in effect
• Lights flashing on all sections of the tower indicated that a tornado warning was in effect or that highly threatening weather would occur

After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as symbols of American patriotism were heavily embraced in their immediate aftermath, KCTV engineers installed LED lights on the tower to correspond to the colors of the United States flag, placing red lights on the top third, white lights on the middle third and blue lights on the bottom third of the structure. In 2004, the lights on the tower were turned off entirely until all of the bulbs could be replaced; the lights on the tower were reactivated on July 1, 2006, with white lights having been installed on all of its sections, as had originally been standard until the 1970s. Since then, the lights have not flashed for the purpose of being a notifier of inclement weather conditions as they did prior to September 11, 2001.

In 2015, a non-profit called The Tower KC, Inc. was founded with the goal of re-lighting the tower as a public art piece. The project includes Kansas City Art Institute faculty member James Woodfill as lead artist and José Faus as lead community engagement artist, with Tower KC founder Jasper Mullarney and Kansas City architecture company El Dorado Inc. providing management for the project. The concept (titled Seeing the Night Bluely by Woodfill) is to capture the colors of the sky every day—from sunrise to sunset, bright blue or overcast—and reproduce them on the tower at night in a minutes-long repeating loop, utilizing LEDs. The Tower KC claims that once live, this installation will be the tallest public art piece in the world.[37]

Syndicated programs broadcast by KCTV (as of September 2017) include Dr. Phil, Inside Edition, Dish Nation and NCIS: New Orleans (which also airs first-run episodes on the station through CBS).[43] The station also produces the talk and lifestyle program Better Kansas City, which airs weekday mornings at 9:00 a.m. and is produced independently from the station's news department; the hour-long show—which debuted on September 10, 2012—is formatted similarly to the Meredith-distributed lifestyle program Better, which aired locally on sister station KSMO-TV from September 2006 until the syndicated series ended its nine-year run in September 2015.[44] The program was placed on a summer hiatus on June 6, 2013 for "retooling", temporarily being replaced by the national Better program before the local iteration returned in its revised format on September 9.[45]

KCTV currently carries the entire CBS network schedule; however, the station airs certain programs out of pattern to make room for its local weekend morning newscasts. As several CBS affiliates in other markets have done since the program's April 2014 expansion into a one-hour broadcast, the station airs Face the Nation in separate half-hour blocks; the first half-hour typically airs on Sunday mornings and the second half-hour airs in late night on each edition's original airdate to accommodate a 90-minute Sunday edition of KCTV 5 News This Morning (during the NFL season, the full hour-long edition is often shown in the late-night slot to accommodate Kansas City Chiefs team programs that supplant both it and KCTV 5 News This Morning in the show's morning slot; sister station KSMO-TV regularly airs Face the Nation in its entirety on late Sunday evenings). KCTV also carries the first two hours of the CBS Dream Team block on a two-hour delay from the "live" network feed to accommodate CBS This Morning Saturday and an hour-long edition of its morning newscast, and defers the third hour to Sundays, preceding CBS News Sunday Morning (although college football and basketball games with late-morning start times that CBS is scheduled to air on certain Saturdays during the fall and winter may subject programs normally aired in the 11:00 a.m. hour on that day to be deferred to Sunday mornings to fulfill educational programming obligations).

Over the years, KCTV had preempted moderate amounts of CBS programming in favor of airing local or syndicated programs. Among the preemptions were certain morning game shows that aired during the network's daytime lineup (such as The $25,000 Pyramid, which the station preempted for its first two seasons on CBS before clearing the program in September 1985, and the network versions of Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune); some talk shows, The CBS Late Movie presentations and drama reruns that aired within the network's late night schedule prior to the August 1993 premiere of the Late Show with David Letterman; a couple of Saturday morning cartoons and the entire Sunday morning cartoon block. Channel 5 also occasionally preempted certain prime time shows in favor of locally produced or syndicated specials. KCTV would eventually begin clearing the full CBS lineup by the early 1990s, although it would continue to air certain programs out of pattern. Notably, it aired The Late Late Show on tape delay from its network-recommended 11:37 p.m. slot starting at the program's debut in September 1995; the talk show initially aired on a 2½-hour delay during its first two seasons under original host Tom Snyder, in favor of airing a mix of off-network sitcoms and first-run syndicated series after the Late Show; the delay gap was shortened to one hour in September 1997, before KCTV moved the program to its "live" network slot in September 2004.

During the 1970s and 1980s, KCMO-TV/KCTV produced several locally produced shows such as Saturday Science Fiction Theatre, a weekly late-night showcase of classic science fiction films. Another of its most popular shows during this period was the horror film showcase Friday Fright Night, which was known for an opening sequence featuring a skull, with an announcer giving the lead-in of the program in both a spooky tone of voice and dialogue only to leave the shot with a prolonged sequence including a sound bite of hysterical laughter. The station chose to preempt the program in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic July 1981 walkway collapse at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City, out of sensitivity to avoid further traumatization of viewers already in shock over the disaster. At least two other shows competed in the genre with Friday Fright Night by the early 1980s including two film showcases aired at that time by KSHB, Creature Features with Crematia Mortem and All Night Live! with Edward Musacare (who hosted the show in character as Uncle Ed) and "Caffeina the Cat", and later Dick Wilson. However, Musacare had previously hosted various spook shows in other markets dating back to the 1960s. One of the most common copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special comes from KCTV, which can be found as first to third generation bootleg copies.

Sports programming

Sideline reporter Dani Welniak interviewing Chiefs coach Andy Reid in 2017.

Since September 1998, KCTV has served as the primary broadcaster of the Kansas City Chiefs, a status that it assumed by way of NBC's former contract with the American Football Conference (AFC) from KSHB-TV, which had carried the team's games from September 1994 (when NBC moved to channel 41 from WDAF-TV) until NBC's broadcast rights to the NFL conference expired after the 1997 season. KCTV also maintained a broadcast partnership with the team's Chiefs Television Network unit under which it held the exclusive local rights to various weekly analysis and magazine programs (including the coaches show Chiefs Kingdom, analysis shows Chiefs Insider and Chiefs Rewind, and the local pre-game show Price Chopper Game Day) plus preseason games that the team syndicates across the region.[46] On September 21, 2019, the Chiefs announced that KSHB and its sister station KMCI would become their official broadcast partners, giving the stations exclusive rights to team programming, including preseason contests, plus marketing opportunities.[47]

Prior to 1998, regular season Chiefs game telecasts on KCMO-TV/KCTV were limited to regionally televised interconference games against opponents in the National Football Conference (NFC), primarily those held at Arrowhead Stadium, under the network's previous contractual rights to that conference that expired after the 1993 season, as well as two of the team's Super Bowl appearances in 1967, 1970, the latter of which had been the team's only championship victory until 2020. Over-the-air broadcasts of Chiefs regular season games not televised by CBS are split locally between KMBC-TV (which airs Monday Night Football broadcasts featuring the team sublicensed by ESPN) and WDAF (which, through Fox's rights to the NFC, carries the team's interconference games as well as AFC-exclusive games to which CBS passed over the rights to Fox under the cross-flexing arrangement implemented by the NFL in 2014); KSHB also carries certain regular season games via NBC's rights to the Sunday Night Football package on occasions when a game involving the Chiefs is scheduled. KCTV will serve as the local broadcaster for the Chiefs' appearance in Super Bowl LV.

From 1990 to 1993, Channel 5 also carried certain regular season Major League Baseball (MLB) games featuring the Kansas City Royals that were televised by CBS during the network's third contractual relationship with the league (most Royals games aired locally on broadcast television during this period were carried by WDAF under a local broadcasting agreement between that station and the Royals, which lasted until the 1992 season).

KCTV presently broadcasts 34 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 5½ hours each weekday, 3½ hours on Saturdays and three hours on Sundays). KCTV also produces seven hours a week of local newscasts for sister station KSMO-TV (consisting of half-hour evening broadcasts at 6:30 and 9:00 p.m., which air seven nights a week). In addition, the station also produces the sports discussion program Off the Bench With Michael Coleman, which debuted on April 25, 2010, and airs Sundays after the 10:00 p.m. newscast.

• Official website – KCTV
• – KSMO-TV website
• KCTV in the FCC's TV station database