KCTV (channel 5) is a television station in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Gray Media alongside KSMO-TV (channel 62), an independent station with MyNetworkTV. The two stations share studios on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas; KCTV's transmitter facility, the KCTV Broadcast Tower, is located in the Union Hill section of Kansas City, Missouri.
Channel 5 was the fourth television channel to go on the air in Kansas City; KCMO-TV began broadcasting on September 27, 1953, as the television adjunct of KCMO radio. Originally an ABC affiliate, it switched to CBS in 1955 as part of a group affiliation agreement negotiated by the Meredith Corporation, which agreed to buy KCMO radio and television less than a week after KCMO-TV began broadcasting. In 1956, the present tower, a Kansas City landmark, was completed to broadcast the station.
Despite protests from Kansas City civic leaders, KCMO-TV moved its studio facilities to Fairway, Kansas, at the end of 1977. Meredith sold the KCMO radio stations in 1983; as this required the television station to change its call sign, it paid a Texas station $25,000 to release the call sign KCTV for use in Kansas City. Gray acquired Meredith in 2021.
History Establishment On January 26, 1948, the KCMO Broadcasting Corporation, owner of Kansas City radio station KCMO (810 AM), applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a permit to build a new television station on channel 5. It would be more than five years before that application was granted, largely because of a four-year freeze on TV station grants. Five different groups had pending applications for new TV stations in Kansas City: KCMO, the New England Broadcasting Company, and Kansas City radio stations KCKN, KMBC, and WHB. The freeze ended in April 1952, at which time KCMO and KMBC were already buying and storing equipment with an eye to starting TV stations, and KCMO had already identified the use of its KCMO-FM tower at its studios at 31st and Grand streets to telecast its station.
While KCMO had already applied for channel 5, KCKN had originally sought channel 2, which was removed from Kansas City in the final 1952 allocations; that station then amended its application to specify channel 5. New England Broadcasting had also filed for channel 5, but its application was dismissed by the FCC in January 1953.
KCKN withdrew its application at the start of June 1953 after co-owned WIBW became the sole applicant for channel 13 in Topeka, Kansas. The FCC granted the construction permit on June 3, 1953, at which time KCMO estimated that KCMO-TV would begin in about four months, bringing to the city additional network programs that WDAF-TV, the only pre-freeze TV station in the city, could not fit in its schedule. This was the first very high frequency (VHF) station construction permit awarded in Kansas City since the end of the freeze; a ultra high frequency (UHF) station, KCTY, had been awarded for channel 25. The grant of KCMO-TV's permit spurred KMBC and WHB, applicants for channel 9, to combine their bids and seek shared-time use of the channel. The FCC promptly approved on June 25, and KMBC-TV and WHB-TV began transmitting from an interim facility on August 2. Channel 9, under both licensees, would be the CBS affiliate in Kansas City; KCMO-TV by that point had set a start date of September 27, the end date of daylight saving time.
KCMO-TV made the September 27 start date, with an official dedication featuring former president Harry Truman as the guest of honor taking place on October 4. It took the ABC affiliation, giving Kansas City four channels for the four networks: NBC on WDAF-TV, CBS on KMBC-TV and WHB-TV, DuMont on KCTY, and ABC on KCMO-TV. Before the first week of telecasting on channel 5 had concluded, the KCMO Broadcasting Company agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Publishing Company of Des Moines, Iowa, for $2 million. Meredith executives had visited several weeks prior to tour the television facility; company president E. T. Meredith joked that he would like to have a radio and television property closer to Des Moines than its holdings in Syracuse, New York. He was more than joking; he expressed serious interest in the property to Tom L. Evans and Lester Cox, KCMO's stockholders, with Cox letting Evans sell the stations. This gave Meredith its fourth television station: it had built WHEN-TV in Syracuse and made radio-TV purchases in consecutive years that brought WOW-TV in Omaha, Nebraska, and KPHO-TV in Phoenix, Arizona, into the fold. DuMont programs moved to KCMO-TV in February 1954, when the network—having bought KCTY in an unsuccessful salvage attempt—opted to shut down that station. The network ceased operations in 1955.
Switch from ABC to CBS In January 1955, Meredith reached a group affiliation deal with CBS covering its radio and television properties outside Phoenix. The agreement saw KCMO radio and television become CBS secondary outlets with immediate effect. The news was received, per a report in Variety, with "puzzlement" in Kansas City, where KMBC radio was the sixth-oldest CBS affiliate with more than 25 years of service to the network. KCMO-TV joined CBS and KMBC-TV joined ABC on September 28, 1955, with their radio counterparts exchanging affiliations on December 1. After a year of construction, in February 1956, the original KCMO-FM tower was replaced by the present tower on the site, then measuring , and the station began broadcasting at the maximum effective radiated power of 100,000 watts.
KCMO continued to broadcast from the 31st Street studios for more than 20 years. However, in 1976, under general manager Charles McAbee, it announced plans to move its operation from Kansas City across the state line to Fairway, Kansas, where it planned to build a studio facility twice the size. Members of city government expressed dismay at the proposed relocation of the radio and television stations and even suggested dismantling the large tower beside the studios as an icing hazard; McAbee claimed to have scouted six sites in Kansas City itself, including Crown Center. Kansas City councilmembers went as far as to allow the legal department to protest the continued use of the KCMO call letters if the radio and television operations moved to Fairway, though the FCC and a federal appeals court rebuffed their challenges. Kansas City's public television station, KCPT, then agreed to purchase the 31st Street studios from KCMO; however, KCMO-TV itself would continue to be broadcast from the tower at the site. The Fairway move was completed at the end of 1977.
Becoming KCTV In 1982, Meredith announced it would sell the Kansas City radio stations to Richard Fairbanks, retaining the television station; it noted that the radio properties were not meeting its "growth objectives". The separation of KCMO radio from KCMO-TV required one or the other to change its call sign upon completion of the sale. Meredith found its new call letters for channel 5 in San Angelo, Texas, where KCTV had been on the air with that designation since 1957. KCMO-TV approached the Texas station, which agreed to seek new call letters, leaving KCTV open to be claimed in Kansas City; the Texas station was reimbursed for all of its expenses in changing over. The KCTV in Texas became KLST in March 1983, and KCMO-TV became KCTV on June 6, 1983, with the station launching a promotional campaign among advertisers and the public.
When a major affiliate realignment caused WDAF-TV to switch affiliations from NBC to Fox in 1994, the displaced NBC network wooed KCTV as an affiliate. However, CBS was also courting Meredith and ultimately able to secure an affiliation agreement for KCTV, KPHO-TV in Phoenix, and WNEM-TV in Saginaw, Michigan, the latter two becoming new CBS affiliates.
Meredith entered into a $26.8 million agreement to acquire the non-license assets of KSMO-TV (channel 62), then an affiliate of The WB owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, in November 2004, immediately assuming responsibility for KSMO's advertising sales and administrative operations under a joint sales agreement and moving its staff to the KCTV facility in Fairway. It also had an option to buy the station if FCC rules so approved for a further $6.7 million. Meredith then filed to buy KSMO-TV outright in January 2005, a transaction that required a failing station waiver from the FCC as there would be fewer than eight unique owners of TV stations in the market. On the grounds that KSMO-TV's revenue and market share had steadily declined in the preceding five years, the commission granted the waiver in September 2005, approving the transaction. It created the third duopoly in Kansas City, alongside KSHB-TV with KMCI-TV and KMBC-TV with KCWE.
KCTV was the CBS affiliate of record in St. Joseph, Missouri, from 1967—when local station KFEQ-TV switched from CBS to ABC—until June 1, 2017, when locally based KBJO-LD (channel 30, which concurrently became KCJO-LD) switched its primary affiliation from Telemundo to CBS. A month later, KCTV was removed from Suddenlink's St. Joseph cable system.
Sale to Gray Television On May 3, 2021, after 68 years of Meredith ownership, Gray Television announced its intent to purchase the Meredith Local Media division, including KCTV and KSMO-TV, for $2.7 billion. The sale was completed on December 1.
Local programming News operation In 1979, KCMO-TV paired Wendall Anschutz, already a 13-year veteran of the channel 5 news staff at that time, with 23-year-old Anne Peterson to anchor the station's evening newscast. The pairing endured in some form through 2001, making it the longest-lasting in Kansas City television. In 1981, channel 5 had the first 10 p.m. newscast in the market to reach a 40 share—40 percent of homes watching TV at that time. However, the station spent most of the 1980s and early 1990s in a competitive battle with KMBC-TV and WDAF-TV for news viewers. It was also the first television station in the United States to begin closed captioning of its local newscasts in 1982—years ahead of Boston's WCVB-TV, which claimed to be the first to do so in 1986.
By the early 1990s, KMBC-TV had taken a clear first place in the market, particularly among more desirable younger viewers. As part of a major overhaul of the station's news programming, in 1993, longtime sportscaster Don Fortune and reporter Marty Lanus were let go. At that time, the station also launched weekend morning newscasts, becoming the second Kansas City outlet to do so behind WDAF-TV and complementing the launch of weekday morning news a year earlier. However, ratings continued to slide to their lowest numbers since 1985. Though figures improved to the point where channel 5 narrowly edged out channel 9 in 1996, KCTV ceded most of that ground in most time periods during 1998.
KCTV's news presentation underwent a major overhaul under Kirk Black, whom Meredith promoted from WNEM-TV to serve as KCTV's general manager in 2001, and news director Regent Ducas, hired in April 2002. The goal was to overtake KMBC-TV as the top-rated television news operation in Kansas City. The major changes included the assignment of the station's news anchors to conduct field reports, the expansion of its weekday morning newscast to a then-unusual 4:30 a.m. in December 2001, and the debut of a late-afternoon newscast at 4:30 p.m. on March 4, 2002. Six months after Ducas's hiring, KCTV adopted "Live. Late-Breaking. Investigative." as its new slogan and unveiled a new, darker-colored news set and new logo with a larger 5. After a severe weather outbreak in May 2003 where the station opted to continue with live coverage helmed by meteorologist Katie Horner, KCTV became aggressive in preempting regular programming for severe weather coverage, sparking the ire of some viewers.