Since its 1953 sign-on, KWTV has periodically preempted or given tape-delayed clearances to some CBS programs to air local, syndicated or special event programs. However, CBS usually did not raise objections to preemptions made by channel 9, since it has typically been one of the network's strongest affiliates. Until 1959, KWTV preempted the
CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards to air syndicated drama series. The station also preempted
CBS News Sunday Morning and
Face the Nation from September 1984 until August 1995, in favor of carrying an extended block of local and syndicated religious programs on Sunday mornings; from the time they regained clearance until 2005, both programs were shown on a half-hour delay to accommodate an additional half-hour of the station's Sunday morning newscast.
Sports programming Seven years before Griffin Communications acquired the latter station, KWTV and KOTV in Tulsa partnered to simulcast three games involving the state's two
Central Hockey League franchises, the
Oklahoma City Blazers and the
Tulsa Oilers, during the league's 1993–94 regular season; the respective sports directors of both stations at that time, Bill Teegins and John Walls, conducted play-by-play for the broadcasts, with KWTV sports anchor Ed Murray (who would later become a news anchor in 1999, and remain in that role until his retirement from television news in 2013) doing color commentary. From 2000 to 2011, KWTV served as the broadcast home for
Oklahoma State Cowboys and
Cowgirls basketball games under an agreement with
Oklahoma State University's Cowboys Sports Network syndication service; the station typically broadcast around three regular season games each year during the run of the contract, which usually aired on a Wednesday or Saturday during
prime time. In August 2013, channel 9 obtained the local television rights to broadcast
NFL preseason games involving the
St. Louis Rams produced by the team's in-house syndication service, the Rams Television Network; for the
2015 season, KWTV diverted broadcasts of the team's Thursday night preseason games to sister station KSBI. (Prior to its acquisition of channel 52, the Thursday games forced KWTV to air first-run episodes of the CBS reality series
Big Brother in late night to allow viewers to watch or record the affected episode on a delayed basis.) KWTV/KSBI's contract with the Rams concluded after the 2015 season as a result of the team's move to Los Angeles effective the following year. (Ironically, most Rams regular season games air on Fox affiliate KOKH-TV by way of
Fox's contractual rights to the NFL's
National Football Conference, while KWTV only carried regular season games featuring the team if
CBS was scheduled to carry an interconference games against an opponent in the
American Football Conference, or after 2014, an NFC-only matchup to which Fox passed the rights to CBS under NFL cross-flex broadcasting provisions.) On July 24, 2015, Griffin announced an agreement with the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) that would return high school football coverage to KSBI after a five-year sabbatical; as a byproduct of the deal, KWTV also maintained partial over-the-air rights to the OSSAA Class 5A and 6A football championships, which were split between the station's main channel, its News 9 Now subchannel and KSBI.
News department history Channel 9's news department began operations when the station signed on the air on December 20, 1953, when it debuted a half-hour newscast at 10 p.m. (broken up, respectively, into 15-minute-long weather and news segments), anchored by Mark Weaver. Bruce Palmer, former
news director at
WKY and eventual national president of the Radio-Television News Editors Association, headed channel 9's news department as its director of news operations until his retirement from broadcasting in 1966. Palmer also conducted weekly editorial segments that dealt with pertinent local issues; the station's editorials, which continued for several years after Palmer's departure, would help earn KWTV several journalistic honors in subsequent years, including the
Sigma Delta Chi Award and the National Headliners Club Award. To enable mobility in shooting spot news content, in 1955, KWTV staff photographer Bill Horton devised a saddle-based shoulder camera rig with a port to insert wet cell batteries on the saddle's rear and an
Auricon Cine-Voice audio control panel (which was hooked to a
dictaphone-style earpiece to monitor the audio recording) at front. By 1959, the station had launched a half-hour noon newscast and a 15-minute-long early evening newscast that led into the
CBS Evening News. KWTV is purported to be the first television station in the Oklahoma City market to conduct consumer and investigative reporting, the first to utilize beat reporters, and was the first television station in the United States to air a consumer-investigative news program,
Call for Action, which was based on a KOMA radio show of the same title. In 1962, assignment reporter
Ed Turner received accolades for a series of reports on
James Meredith, who in October of that year, became the first African American to enroll into and attend the
University of Mississippi and whose entry led to
civil unrest and rioting at the campus. In 1968, the station hired Paul R. Lehman as a weekend anchor and assignment reporter, becoming the first African American to work as a television reporter in the Oklahoma City market; given the lingering racial climate in the
southern United States after the passage of the
Civil Rights Act, Lehman's appointment was not without controversy, as some viewers who were displeased with his appointment called into the station's phone switchboard to complain, some of whom went so far as to lodge
death threats against him. Lehman co-created and hosted a community affairs show aimed at black audiences,
Soul Talk, for the station in 1969. Upon KWTV's rebranding of its newscasts as
Newsroom 9 on September 13, 1971, as the
Prime Time Access Rule (an FCC regulatory act that reduced the prime time schedules of the three major networks, which previously ran for hours, by 30 minutes) was being instituted, KWTV launched Oklahoma City's first hour-long 6 p.m. newscast, adding an additional half-hour to its existing early evening newscast, predating the expansion of KFOR-TV's 6 p.m. to an hour-long broadcast by 24 years. In November 1972, urban affairs reporter Andrew Fisher—while covering a staff briefing that followed the commission's monthly meeting—interviewed Oklahoma Securities Commission chairman Charles E. McCune about a security registration requirement for Los Angeles–based commodities broker
Goldstein, Samuelson, Inc. McCune made an
anti-Semitic comment regarding the company's fitness for operation based on its name and, later, with full knowledge he was being recorded by Fisher, said "I think they are Jewish and I think that they are skunks—the name and what they've done," when asked what prompted the earlier remark. The interview led to his resignation (called upon by then-Governor
David Hall) following the broadcast of the remark on the station's newscasts.
H. Martin "Marty" Haag, who oversaw the news department at that time, left KWTV in 1973; that year, he brought over three of the station's top-tier reporters,
Tracy Rowlett, Doug Fox and Byron Harris, to his new job as news director at
WFAA in Dallas-Fort Worth as part of his successful effort to strengthen that station's news operation. In 1976, Pam Olson became the first woman to anchor a local evening news program in the Oklahoma City market, when she was paired alongside Jerry Adams (who would later anchor at KTVY and KOCO-TV during the 1980s) on the 6 p.m. newscast. Olson's tenure at the station saw the airing of a documentary she wrote and produced in cooperation with the
National Kidney Foundation,
Gift of Life, which chronicled four kidney dialysis patients awaiting transplants; the special led to the passage of a state law that created an organ donor registry and donor ID information on Oklahoma identification cards and drivers' licenses. On September 18, 1978, the station split its early evening newscasts into two half-hour programs at 5 and 6 p.m., bookending the 5:30 p.m. airing of the
CBS Evening News, the former of which was the first 5 p.m. newscast to debut in the Oklahoma City market; also on that date, KWTV launched an hour-long 11:30 a.m. newscast. In 1979, the station began utilizing a
helicopter to provide coverage of breaking news events and severe weather, with the introduction of "Hot Shot 9". A rotational camera was installed below the nose of the chopper (branded as "EagleVision") in 2000, superseding the need for an in-helicopter cameraman to film breaking news. The helicopter used for KWTV was sold to KOTV to replace its previous helicopter model in 2006, when KWTV purchased a $1.5-million
Bell 407 helicopter, branded as "SkyNews9 HD" (now branded "Bob Mills SkyNews9 HD", through a sponsorship and brand licensing agreement with Oklahoma City-based regional furniture retail chain Bob Mills Furniture), which was the first in the market to be equipped with a high-definition camera that also has optical zoom capability. On April 30, 2025, N9TV had crash-landed at
Wiley Post Airport, with no injuries. Ratings for KWTV's newscasts—then branded as
Big 9 News, dropped to third place in 1980, partly due to a resurgent KOCO news operation, which overtook it for second place among the market's evening newscasts with the team of Jack Bowen, Mary Ruth Carleton, chief meteorologist Fred Norman and sports director Jerry Park. The station enacted a series of staffing changes to shore up its news viewership, resulting in the firings of longtime anchors Bert Rudman and Phil Schuman, and reporter Debra Lane during the early 1980s. Replacing Adams and Faubion on the 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts were Roger Cooper and Patti Suarez, who, alongside chief meteorologist
Gary England and sports director Jim Miller (later replaced by the fall of 1981 by John Snyder, who had previously served as KWTV's sports director in the mid-to-late 1970s), led channel 9 to an intense battle with and, by the mid-1980s, eventually overtake KTVY for the top ratings spot in evening news. Channel 9 also poached several former KOCO personalities in 1984, amid a massive staff restructuring at channel 5 under newly appointed vice president of news operations Gary Long. They were later followed by the arrival of another KOCO anchor, Jack Bowen, who replaced Cooper as evening co-anchor in 1987. In 1986, KWTV rolled out a
satellite news-gathering unit, "Newstar 9" a transportable video uplink system that the station used to cover news and weather events around and outside of Oklahoma. The station became the third and last television station in Oklahoma City to launch a weekend morning newscast in July 1993, with the debut of a two-hour Saturday broadcast from 6 to 8 a.m.; the program was joined by a Sunday edition in September 1995. Kelly Ogle joined KWTV as a business/investigative reporter and midday news anchor in 1990; his family has primarily been associated with KFOR-TV since his father, Jack Ogle, served as an anchor (and later, news director) at channel 4 from 1962 to 1977, although had a prior association with channel 9 through occasional commentary pieces that Jack conducted for the station into the 1980s. On October 24, 2010, KWTV became the second television station in the Oklahoma City market to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. On January 24, 2011, KWTV expanded its weekday morning newscasts with the addition of a third hour of the program at 4 a.m. In February 2016, KWTV launched "Drone 9", a
quadcopter—the first to be used for newsgathering purposes in the Oklahoma City market—that would be used to provide aerial footage as a supplement to "Bob Mills SkyNews9 HD". Likewise, sister station KOTV subsequently deployed a quadcopter branded as "Drone 6". On July 14, 2016, KWTV announced the implementation of "StreetScope", an
Augmented Reality System developed by Churchill Navigation that overlays street and building names over live footage from the station's helicopter camera during breaking news and severe weather events; it is the first television station in the United States to use this technology.
Weather coverage KWTV places a significant emphasis on weather, and has long been considered to be a pioneer in severe weather coverage and television forecasting technology. Most of these advances were attributed to
Seiling native Gary England, who was often referred to as "Oklahoma's #1 meteorologist" in station
promotions and newscast introductions for most of his tenure with channel 9. England holds the record as the state's longest-serving television meteorologist, working as chief meteorologist at KWTV from October 16, 1972, until his retirement from regular broadcasting on August 28, 2013, shortly before he assumed a newly created post as Griffin Communications' vice president of corporate relations and weather development. England—who, in 1986, would become the first Oklahoma City television personality to sign a million-dollar contract package—replaced David Grant, who succeeded original chief meteorologist
Harry Volkman (whose tenure also saw channel 9 become the first station in Oklahoma City to acquire a
weather radar) in 1960. England's weather coverage earned him numerous awards over his 41-year career with the station (including three Heartland Emmys, National and Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards and a Silver Circle Award, most notably for KWTV's coverage of a
tornado outbreak that produced an
intense F5 tornado that devastated portions of
Moore and
Bridge Creek on May 3, 1999). In 1973, England enlisted
ham radio operators to serve as on-scene observationalists during severe weather situations, using a self-diagramed chart of central Oklahoma (divided into square diagrams) and an alphanumeric coding system he developed for the operators to relay their location. That February, Griffin purchased a World War II-era radar (similar in model to the
WSR-57) from
Huntsville, Alabama–based
Enterprise Electronics Corporation, the first proprietary broadcast weather radar in the U.S. (four years later, KWTV became the first television station in Oklahoma to have its own color weather radar). It was first utilized to detect a violent F4 tornado that caused extensive damage in
Union City on May 24, 1973 (the original film footage from the accompanying televised warning was featured in station-produced weather promos in later years). England lamented the lack of warning lead time, specifically for tornado warnings. In 1978, KWTV became the first television station in the U.S. to broadcast high-resolution weather satellite imagery. In 1990, England, with the help of a station technician, co-developed
First Warning, a software product that displays a weather alert map (which was originally updated via manual input by weather staff) during regular programming, along with a crawl showing detailed alerts issued by the NWS and the
National Severe Storms Forecast Center. ("First Alert", an automated iteration of the software, was developed by KOCO that same year.) •
David Payne (
AMS and
NWA Seals of Approval) – chief meteorologist; weekdays at 4 and weeknights at 5, 6 and 10 p.m.
Notable former on-air staff •
Dean Blevins – sports director; co-host of
Oklahoma Sports Blitz (1997–2025) •
Mike Boettcher – reporter (1978–1980) •
Gary England – chief meteorologist (1972–2013) •
Shon Gables – weekend morning anchor/reporter (1998–2001) •
Chris Harrison – weekend sports anchor/reporter (1993–1999) •
Tiffany Liou – reporter (2016–2018) •
Lauren Nelson – 4 p.m. anchor (2010–2013) •
Frances Rivera – reporter (1999–2001) •
Tracy Rowlett – anchor/reporter (1970–1974) •
Ed Turner – reporter/news director (1960–1966) •
Harry Volkman – chief meteorologist (1954–1960) •
Bob "Hoolihan" Wells – announcer (1957–1959) ==Technical information==