KCTV (channel 5) is a television station in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Gray Television alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate KSMO-TV (channel 62). Both stations share studios on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas, while 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 constructed to broadcast the station.
Over 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.
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 VHF station construction permit awarded in Kansas City since the end of the freeze; a 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 sold itself to the Meredith Publishing Company of Des Moines, Iowa, for $2 million. Meredith executives, including company founder and namesake Edwin T. Meredith, had visited several weeks prior to tour the television facility. Edwin 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 (1951) and KPHO-TV in Phoenix, Arizona (1952) 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.