Since its inception, KHOU has been a CBS affiliate, and has largely cleared the entire CBS network lineup without interruption. In addition to its newscasts, KHOU also airs
Great Day Houston, a local
talk show hosted by Deborah Duncan with paid segments from local businesses in Houston, following
CBS Mornings. The talk show, which has aired on the station since 2005, is taped at KHOU's studios on Westheimer Road west of the Galleria. KHOU also serves as the local television broadcaster of Houston's annual
Thanksgiving Day parade, the
H-E-B Holiday Parade. Despite being in a market with an ABC-owned station (KTRK-TV),
Jeopardy! aired on KHOU from 1986 to 2015 and
Wheel of Fortune has aired on that station since 1986 despite their presence on ABC's other network-owned stations along with another ABC O&O syndication staple,
The Oprah Winfrey Show, which KHOU carried for its entire run from 1986 to 2011.
Jeopardy! moved to KTRK on September 14, 2015, making it the last ABC-owned station to carry the quiz show. However, KHOU continues to carry
Wheel of Fortune at 6:30 p.m., making Houston one of the few markets in the United States where both game shows air on separate stations; in most markets, both game shows are sold as a package, often airing next to one another on the same station in prime time access. Both shows rarely air next to each other in most markets in the Central and Mountain time zones, as most network affiliates often program a 6 p.m. newscast during the traditional
access hour (7 p.m. ET/6 p.m. CT) before prime time, with KTRK itself having aired an hourlong 6 p.m. newscast in this hour since September 1982. In 1987, KHOU refused to air
a television adaptation of the then-popular
Garbage Pail Kids trading card series on Saturday mornings, owing to concerns regarding the show's ridicule of the disabled and its abundance of heavy violence; as a result of these decisions and concerns, CBS decided to remove the series from their Saturday morning schedule for the 1987–88 television season, and the series, to date, has never been telecast in the United States. Like most CBS affiliates prior to 1993, KHOU often carried syndicated programming (including
Entertainment Tonight and reruns of
M*A*S*H) in late night following its 10 p.m. newscast, as the network's late night offerings of the era were considered to be less lucrative compared to syndicated offerings. Beginning in 1993, KHOU (like most CBS affiliates) began carrying the
Late Show (then hosted by
David Letterman) at 11:05 p.m.
CT, eventually moving it to immediately following its 10 p.m. newscast (at 10:35 p.m. CT) by 1995. However, the station had always aired
The Late Late Show on a
30-minute delay (beginning at 12:07 a.m. CT) since the show first premiered in 1995, fitting a syndicated sitcom, game show or tabloid news program between the two shows. Because the latter program's original host,
Tom Snyder, had a simulcast with the
CBS Radio Network (which aired locally on
KPRC-AM) and took calls from viewers during his stint as host, KHOU asked via disclaimer for Houston area viewers to not call the toll-free call-in number due to the tape-delay. This practice would continue under later hosts
Craig Kilborn and
Craig Ferguson, as well as the first few months of
James Corden's tenure as host. On September 8, 2015, it began airing
The Late Late Show at its network-approved time (11:37 p.m. CT) following
Stephen Colbert's debut as host of
The Late Show; leaving the station's only CBS preemption being that of the second half-hour of the
Sunday morning talk show Face the Nation, which had been tape-delayed to 2:30 a.m. the following Monday morning due to KHOU's longstanding broadcasts of
religious programs from Houston-based
Lakewood Church and
Second Baptist Church, with the former also airing on Sunday night following its 10 p.m. newscast and
KHOU 11 Sports Extra (see below). After Lakewood's broadcasts moved to KTRK in 2020 (only to return to KHOU at 11 p.m. only on Sunday nights the following year),
Face the Nation began airing its full hour at 9:30 a.m., where the first half-hour had already been airing for years, with the religious broadcast from Second Baptist Church continuing to air at 10:30 a.m.
Sports programming In
2002, the
Houston Texans joined the NFL as the league's 32nd franchise, as part of the
American Football Conference's newly formed
South Division. Being part of the AFC, most Texans games—including all road games against
NFC opponents—are aired on
CBS (which has held the contract to carry AFC games since the 1998 season), and are therefore aired locally on KHOU. The station also served as the over-the-air outlet for all of the Texans' appearances on
Thursday Night Football until 2018 (when Fox picked up the full rights to the Thursday night package that lasted until 2021, thus moving those telecasts locally to KRIV), and have aired simulcasts of ESPN's
Monday Night Football in the past (due to ABC's live broadcast of
Dancing with the Stars on KTRK conflicting with the games). The Texans are one of two teams never to have been
blacked out at home, the other being the
Baltimore Ravens; this stands in contrast to the city's previous NFL team, the
Houston Oilers, who were often blacked out at home in their twilight years in Houston
before moving to Nashville in 1997 for reasons related to the team's controversial management under owner
Bud Adams. Beginning in
2014, with the institution of 'cross-flex' rules, games in which the Texans play an NFC opponent at home can be moved from Fox O&O
KRIV (channel 26) to KHOU, with the same standard also applying for AFC road games at
NRG Stadium being moved over to KRIV. Other notable appearances by Houston sports teams on KHOU have included the
Houston Rockets'
1981 and
1986 appearances in the
NBA Finals (both losses to the Boston Celtics; all Rockets games broadcast through CBS' NBA broadcast contract were aired on KHOU from 1973 to 1990) and the
University of Houston men's basketball team's three NCAA National Championship appearances in
1983,
1984, and
2025, and their other Final Four appearance in
2021—all via their national coverage by
CBS Sports. KHOU also carried
Southwest Conference football and men's basketball games (with an emphasis on games involving the
University of Houston and
Rice University) on Saturday afternoons before the conference folded in 1996, as well as CBS' broadcasts of the
2011 and the
2023 NCAA Final Fours and Super Bowls
VIII (1974) and
XXXVIII (2004)—all of which took place in Houston. Presently, KHOU may also carry select games from the
National Women's Soccer League's
Houston Dash.
News operation KHOU presently broadcasts 36 hours, 25 minutes of locally produced newscasts each week (with 6 hours, 5 minutes each weekday and three hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). On weekdays, this includes a two-hour morning newscast from 5 to 7 a.m., a full hour at 4 p.m., and half-hours at noon, 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Its weekend newscasts include a one-hour morning newscast on Saturday morning, hour-long newscasts at 10 p.m. on Saturday and on Sunday morning, and half-hours at 6 p.m. on Saturday and 5:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Sunday. The station also airs
KHOU 11 Sports Extra, which features extensive Sunday night sports coverage and commentary, following its 10 p.m. newscast on Sunday night. for "Under Fire: Discrimination and Corruption in the Texas National Guard" Throughout its existence, KHOU has been widely regarded as a stepping stone for many well-known television news personalities, as many of its reporters have gone on to work for national networks. KHOU's best known former on-air staffers include former
CBS Evening News anchor
Dan Rather,
NBC News correspondent
Dennis Murphy, newswomen
Linda Ellerbee and
Jessica Savitch, and sports anchors
Jim Nantz (now the lead announcer for CBS Sports),
Harry Kalas (later a legendary broadcaster for
Major League Baseball and
NFL Films) and
Ron Franklin (later with
ESPN). Outside of broadcasting, one of its former sports anchors,
Dan Patrick, eventually became
Lieutenant Governor of Texas. KHOU also has gained a reputation for its investigative reporting staff (currently known as
KHOU 11 Investigates), whose most notable stories include
its 2000 investigation into defective tire designs by Firestone – which led to the mandatory recall of Wilderness AT, Firestone ATX and ATX II tires, as well as numerous lawsuits (the defective tires resulted in a number of deaths, including that of KTRK reporter Stephen Gauvain), a story in the early 2000s that led to the shutdown of the
Houston Police Department's crime lab, and allegations of dropout rate fraud in the
Houston Independent School District, which resulted in the dismissal of several HISD officials. All of these stories were initially reported by investigative reporter Anna Werner, who eventually went on to become the chief investigative reporter for
CBS News.
History Despite not being historically associated with a major newspaper, and being based in Galveston for most of the 1950s, news has always played an integral role in the history of KHOU. The station gained notoriety in 1961 when then-anchor Dan Rather showed what was believed to be the first radar image of a hurricane broadcast on television during
Hurricane Carla; this report, which was credited for saving thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost, would later become a catalyst in his eventual hiring by CBS News. In 1970, KHOU had boasted of the top-rated news team in Houston, led by anchorman
Ron Stone (who had been discovered by Rather in 1961), weatherman Sid Lasher and sports director Ron Franklin. The station entered a tumultuous period during the early 1970s, when Stone departed for a radio reporter role with NBC News in New York and Lasher died from a fatal heart attack in a station breakroom shortly after KHOU's 6 p.m. newscast concluded one night. Stone would eventually return to Houston in 1972 to become the lead anchor at KPRC-TV, and helped that station to overtake KHOU as the leading news station in Houston; both stations would eventually be overtaken by KTRK-TV, whose
Eyewitness News came to dominate the Houston market for the next several decades and which had become one of ABC's strongest affiliates by the end of the decade, eventually becoming one of the network's
owned-and-operated stations in 1986. While the station did hire former KPRC-TV lead anchor Steve Smith away from
KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh to become its lead anchor in 1975 (a role he maintained for the next 24 years at the station), KHOU continued to trail its rivals as the decade progressed. A string of notable departures also did not help the station's cause, including the 1976 departure of chief meteorologist Doug Brown (who himself succeeded Lasher) to KTRK where he became that station's longtime morning meteorologist, and the subsequent departures to KPRC of news anchors Bob Nicholas (one of Houston's first African-American news anchors) in 1979 and Bill Balleza in 1980, with the latter also joined that year by the aforementioned Ron Franklin, who moved to KHOU to fill the same role of sports director at KPRC. As a result, channel 11 crashed to last place, and would largely remain entrenched in this position throughout the 1980s. When Belo acquired KHOU in 1984, the station continued to trail behind dominant KTRK and NBC affiliate KPRC, which usually placed a strong second and would further benefit in the decade from NBC's strong prime time programming of the 1980s. Its newscasts fared even worse than CBS' own floundering network programming itself at the time, occasionally even placing behind syndicated reruns on independent stations in the Houston market. Having achieved considerable success with the news department of its flagship station in Dallas, WFAA, since the 1970s, Belo sought to seek similar results for KHOU, and beginning in the late 1980s hired several high-profile people to its news team. The most notable was former
National Hurricane Center director Dr.
Neil Frank, who was hired as the station's chief meteorologist in July 1987. In another key move, KHOU also hired former KTRK morning anchor Sylvan Rodriguez (then a correspondent with
ABC News' West Coast bureau) to anchor the station's early evening newscasts. During this time, KHOU also commissioned an image rebrand using the "Spirit of Texas" slogan and (initially)
TM Productions' "Spirit" music package that originated at its Dallas sister station WFAA. In January 1989, KHOU revamped the appearance of its newscasts, with an image campaign that included full-page ads in the
Houston Chronicle and
Post, as well as an on-air promotional campaign that focused more on ordinary citizens throughout
Greater Houston than on its news team. With a main team consisting of anchors Steve Smith and Marlene McClinton (who the station hired from
WMAQ-TV in Chicago), chief meteorologist Dr. Neil Frank and sports director
Giff Nielsen (a former
Houston Oilers quarterback who became KHOU's lead sports anchor following his retirement from the NFL in 1984), along with a new set, graphics and theme music, KHOU began to mount a serious challenge to its longtime competitors, evolving into a competitive ratings race during the 1990s. Its resurgent newscasts, combined with a strong syndicated programming lineup, helped to sustain the station through what would be a turbulent ratings period for CBS, which
lost broadcast rights to NFL games in addition to
several of its largest affiliates (including its longtime affiliates in
Dallas and
Austin) during this time. 1999 proved to be a breakout year for KHOU, with its newscasts reaching #1 in viewership in several timeslots during the May sweeps period, unseating KTRK during the midday hours, and at 5 p.m. (it debuted in May 1974) and 6 p.m., which also coincided with CBS' resurgence to number one in prime time by that year. The station's ratings boost, aided by its continuously strong syndicated lineup and a series of high-profile investigative reports by the station, also included an exclusive interview with
Serbian and
Yugoslavian President
Slobodan Milosevic during the
Kosovo War, just a month before his indictment, that drew international news coverage. This news came despite the station losing three of its core anchors key to the station's resurgence: longtime anchor Steve Smith, who retired from broadcasting in May 1999 to pursue other interests, his fellow anchor Marlene McClinton, who abruptly resigned during one of the station's newscasts in September 1999, and 6 p.m. anchor Sylvan Rodriguez, who had been diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer and eventually succumbed to the disease in April 2000. Two former local newscasters in New York City, Greg Hurst of ABC flagship
WABC-TV and Len Cannon of Fox flagship
WNYW (the latter also a former NBC News correspondent and substitute anchor), would respectively join the station, with Hurst succeeding Smith as lead anchor in 1999 and Cannon joining the station in 2006 to replace longtime anchor Jerome Gray, who went to rival KPRC-TV. Cannon himself became lead anchor in 2017 after Hurst left the station (with Hurst eventually joining fellow CBS affiliate
WREG-TV in
Memphis). On February 4, 2007, following CBS' coverage of
Super Bowl XLI, KHOU began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, becoming the first station in the market to do so. On September 7, 2009, KHOU-TV expanded its weekday morning newscast with the addition of the 4:30 a.m. program
First Look; despite being the last station in the Houston market to launch a 4:30 a.m. newscast, KHOU was the only station in the market to announce its intentions to do so (three of Houston's major network affiliates – KHOU, KTRK-TV and KPRC-TV – launched 4:30 a.m. newscasts within three weeks of each other in the late summer of 2009 with little fanfare). On August 1, 2011, KHOU debuted a new half-hour newscast at 4 p.m. on weekdays to replace
The Oprah Winfrey Show; this would expand to a full hour in 2015 after losing the Houston rights to
Jeopardy! to KTRK. Like many CBS and ABC stations in other markets, KHOU has also expanded its weekend 10 p.m. news broadcast to a full hour, including the aforementioned
KHOU 11 Sports Extra on Sunday nights. In 2018, the station rebranded its weekday morning newscasts as
HTownRush, with a format emphasizing social media interaction including its own namesake hashtag, a summary of top stories during the first five minutes of each half-hour, and special segments including in-house features exclusive to Tegna stations such as
Deal Boss, one-minute business/technology news briefs from
Cheddar, and consumer reporter John Matarese's ''Don't Waste Your Money
consumer segments (which usually air on stations owned by the E. W. Scripps Company). In June 2019, KHOU engaged in a similar rebranding process for its 4 p.m. newscast, rebranded as The 411
, emphasizing a conceptual format and on-air graphics style similar to that of its morning newscast. KHOU has since dropped the HTownRush
branding for its morning newscast as of 2022, instead rebranding as KHOU 11 Morning News''. Unlike most CBS affiliates, the station did not air a Sunday morning newscast until January 5, 2020, with the hour before
CBS Sunday Morning instead being filled by one of CBS's
three hours of
E/I programming which KHOU preempted to carry a Saturday morning newscast in between the two hours of
CBS This Morning Saturday. Following the launch of the Sunday morning newscast and subsequent changes in
federal regulations on children's television programming, KHOU has since aired two of CBS's three hours of E/I programming from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, followed by the full broadcast of
CBS Saturday Morning leading into KHOU's Saturday morning newscast from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Notable current on-air staff •
Jacob Rascon – anchor/reporter
Notable former on-air staff •
Steve Edwards – anchor/talk show host (1972–1975) •
Linda Ellerbee – reporter (1972–1973) •
Dr. Neil Frank – chief meteorologist (1987–2008) •
Ron Franklin – sports director (1971–1980) •
John Hambrick – anchor/reporter (1960s) •
Joanne Herring – host of
The Joanne King Show (1950s–1974) •
Dennis Murphy – reporter/assignment editor (1975–1978) •
Jim Nantz – sports anchor/reporter (early 1980s) •
Chau Nguyen – anchor/reporter (2003–2007) •
Giff Nielsen – sports director (1984–2009) •
Dan Patrick – sports director (1979–1984) •
Dan Rather – anchor/reporter (early 1960s) •
Rick Sanchez – reporter (1986–1988) •
Jessica Savitch – anchor/reporter (1971–1972) •
Janet Shamlian – anchor/reporter (1987–1995) •
Ron Stone – anchor (1961–1972)
Criticism On November 24, 2022, KHOU was criticized for interrupting a
Thanksgiving Day game between the
Buffalo Bills and the
Detroit Lions for a tornado warning with 23 seconds left in the game, which caused viewers to miss a last second game-winning field goal by the Bills. The station did not incorporate a picture-in-picture treatment or split-screen format for viewers in Houston to continue watching the game when the weather report was issued. KHOU did not make a public apology after the interruption incident. ==Technical information and subchannels==