Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was the TV station KWHB established?
After the Rehburg group backed out of the sale, the permit would finally find a buyer who would sign on the station in the fall of 1984, when the permit was sold to San Francisco-based Coit Drapery and Cleaners, Inc. Channel 47, as KTCT, first signed on the air on June 3, 1985. Operating as a religious independent station, it originally maintained studio facilities located at East 58th Street and South Garnett Road in southeastern Tulsa (0.1 miles [0.16km] east of the then-studio facility of KGCT). Its initial schedule consisted of Christian programming from the PTL Satellite Network, including shows such as The PTL Club, Heritage Village USA and 100 Huntley Street, as well as programs from televangelists such as Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and Richard Roberts. KTCT suffered from financial problems early on, and reduced its programming schedule to approximately six hours a day by that winter. Coit Drapery and Cleaners opted to put KTCT up for sale there, and wanted to sell the station to a Christian religious broadcast ministry.
On May 4, 1999, transmission lines at KWHB's Coweta transmitter facility were knocked out due to intense lightning related to severe thunderstorms associated with a storm system that produced 66 tornadoes across the central third of Oklahoma on May 3. KWHB's signal was taken offline on May 8, due to a steady decrease in power to the transmission lines, as station engineers were preparing to remove and replace the lines and their internal electrical conductors. On that date, TCI regained access to the station at its northeastern Oklahoma headends after repairs to the direct fiber optic studio feed were completed. KWHB's over-the-air signal returned to the air on May 19.[32]
From 1997 to 1999, KWHB carried outlaw and championship sprint car races held at Tulsa Speedway (which closed in 2005) each weekend during the track's auto racing season.[53] From 1999 to 2004, the station carried regular season and occasional playoff minor league baseball games involving the Tulsa Drillers. The agreement marked the first time that the Drillers had their games aired on local television since 1994 (when TCI discontinued an exclusive contract with the team to carry its games on the provider's two community access channels, with select games airing regionally on Home Sports Entertainment [HSE]), and the first time since 1982 that the team's games were carried over-the-air locally (when ABC affiliate KTUL (channel 8) and then-independent station KOKI-TV (channel 23, now a Fox affiliate) carried an approximately 20-game regular season package that year). For the final year of the contract, KWHB carried most of the team's 2004 regular season games, though declining ratings resulted in the station cancelling plans to air the last two scheduled Drillers broadcasts at the end of the season.[54][55][56]
Home games were formerly televised on KWHB TV-47 and Cox cable channel 7 in Tulsa on a one-hour delay.
Purchased by Family Broadcasting Corporation in 1985, KWHB-TV 47 is the oldest Christian television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Today, KWHB can be viewed on over 84 cable stations in Oklahoma, serving a potential audience of over 1.5 million people.
On January 25, 1994, Clear Channel reached an agreement with Paramount Television and Chris-Craft/United Television to affiliate four Clear Channel-owned or -operated independent stations with the United Paramount Network (UPN), which was founded by Chris-Craft and its BHC Communications/United Television broadcasting subsidiary, in a programming partnership with Viacom (which would purchase a 50% interest in the network in 1996). In a joint press release, Chris-Craft and Paramount confirmed that KTFO would serve as UPN's Tulsa charter affiliate. However, it was likely to have joined UPN in any event as the fledgling network's only other option among the commercial television stations in the Tulsa market was LeSEA Broadcasting-owned independent KWHB (channel 47), which would likely have declined to carry certain UPN programs that did not meet the Christian-based religious organization's strict secular program content guidelines. (Despite that issue, KWHB would become a part-time affiliate of The WB when that network launched on January 11, 1995.) Channel 41 formally affiliated with the network when it launched on January 16, 1995.
Alongside UPN prime time programming, KTFO – which concurrently changed its branding to "UPN 41" – carried some recent and classic off-network sitcoms and drama series, movies in prime time and on weekends, some first-run syndicated shows, and a blend of cartoons and a few live-action children's shows from both individual distributors and The Disney Afternoon syndication block. (The station's children's programming inventory expanded when UPN launched the UPN Kids program block in September 1995, and was eventually relegated to syndicated content after the successor Disney's One Too block was discontinued by the network in August 2003.) As it did for most of its tenure as an independent, the station continued to fill the 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. time slot with feature films and some first-run syndicated programs as, at the time of its launch on that date, UPN had only maintained a lineup of prime time programs on Monday and Tuesday nights; this would become less of an issue as UPN launched a supplemental weekend film package in September 1995 (the "UPN Movie Trailer", which was eventually replaced by a block of same-week repeats of UPN's drama and reality series) and additional nights of programming over the next four years, adopting a five-night weekly schedule on Monday through Fridays in September 1998. As time went on, KTFO began to divest many of the classic sitcom reruns that populated its schedule, in favor of airing more talk, reality and court shows on its daytime schedule and more recent sitcoms and first-run and off-network drama series in the evening. From 1998 to 2006, some station promotions also included the "UPN Girls," a group of four women between the ages of 18 and 25, who also served as hosts for a Saturday night movie showcase on KTFO and made publicity appearances at local events (other UPN affiliates that Clear Channel owned or managed, such as KASN [now a CW affiliate] in Little Rock and WTEV-TV [now CBS affiliate WJAX-TV] in Jacksonville employed the "UPN Girls" concept during this period).
Since coming under LeSEA ownership in the late 1980s, channel 47 has carried various local and syndicated sporting events. The station carried weekly high school football games involving teams from northeastern Oklahoma high schools on Friday nights in the fall of 1989; it expanded high school sports coverage expanded in January 1990, when KWHB began carrying a high school basketball "game-of-the-week" each Friday evening. Most of the games were broadcast on tape delay in late night on the night the game was held, though most games began to be televised live in 2005. In addition, starting in 2000, the station maintained a contract with Jenks High School to telecast games involving the Jenks Trojans football and basketball teams.[41][42][43] From 1992 to 1999, KWHB held the local broadcast rights to televise NFL preseason games involving the Dallas Cowboys.[44] From 1992 to 1995, the station also carried tape-delayed broadcasts of Central Hockey League games featuring the Tulsa Oilers.[45]
KWHB became a network affiliate on January 11, 1995, when it initiated a rather informal charter affiliation with The WB at that network's launch. Channel 47 initially carried the network's family-oriented prime time shows (such as 7th Heaven, The Parent 'Hood, Smart Guy and Sister, Sister) and, beginning with its debut that September, animated series from the network's children's program block, Kids' WB, on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. However, because of LeSEA Broadcasting's ministerial structure, the strict content guidelines that the group maintained for secular programs carried on its stations resulted in KWHB refusing to clear prime time network shows that contained strong profanity, violent or sexual content (such as Unhappily Ever After, Savannah, Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) on the belief that they would offend the sensibilities of channel 47's mostly Christian and Evangelical viewership; these programs were substituted with ministry and televangelist programs already in LeSEA's inventory, sports or secular syndicated programs. Originally, this was not a significant issue as the pre-empted programs could be seen in the market via the superstation feed of Chicago WB affiliate WGN-TV (now standalone cable channel WGN America) on most of the area's cable and satellite providers.[20][21][22]
The station signed on the air on September 10, 1962, as WDCN-TV (for Davidson County Nashville), on VHF channel 2. It is Tennessee's second-oldest educational television station, behind WKNO-TV in Memphis, established four years earlier in 1956. It was originally licensed to the board of Nashville Public Schools, which became an arm of the metropolitan government when Nashville and Davidson County merged in 1963. Like most eventual PBS member stations, WDCN was mainly established to serve area schoolchildren with educational programming.
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
In August 1998, LeSEA Broadcasting and KWHB were fined up to $12,000 by the Federal Communications Commission for exceeded Children's Television Act advertising limits (which restrict programming time allocated to commercials to 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends) during children's programs that aired on the station a total of 47 times between July 13, 1996 and December 1, 1997. In a notice of apparent liability for forfeiture, the FCC noted that the station noted on its last renewal application that it had exceeded the guidelines by anywhere between 15 and 95 seconds during the cited incidents. The station cited in an application for its prior license renewal that the violations resulted from "inadvertence and/or human error stemming from the failure of KWHB's personnel to detect, over the course of more than a year, a computer error responsible for the commercial overages," and issue that the Commission has "repeatedly rejected" as a reasoning for advertising time violations in the past.[31] In 2001, KWHB moved to new studio facilities located on South Memorial Drive (north of East 91st Street) in southeastern Tulsa.
KWHB began transmitting a digital television signal on UHF channel 48 on February 21, 2003. The station shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 47, on February 17, 2009 (the original target date for full-power television stations in the United States to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which Congress had moved the previous month to June 12 to allow additional time for consumers unprepared for the changeover to make necessary precautions to continue receiving broadcast stations). The station's digital channel assignment was relocated from its pre-transition allocation on UHF channel 48 to its former analog-era allocation, UHF channel 47.[36][37][38]
As of September 2018, syndicated secular programs broadcast on KWHB include The Steve Harvey Show, Who's the Boss?, Just Shoot Me, Heartland, Celebrity Page and The Andy Griffith Show. Syndicated religious programs broadcast by KWHB include the Believer's Voice of Victory, Life Today, The Gospel Truth with Andrew Wommack, Manna-Fest With Perry Stone and In Touch with Dr. Charles Stanley.[39]
CITO was established in 1971 as CKSO-TV-2, originally rebroadcasting CKSO in Sudbury. Unlike CKSO and CKNY in North Bay, which were established in the 1950s as CBC affiliates and then reaffiliated with CTV in 1971 when J. Conrad Lavigne established new CBC stations in those markets, in Timmins Lavigne's existing station CFCL retained its CBC affiliation and CTV service was provided by a rebroadcast transmitter of CKSO.
In October 1983, Church of the Christian Crusade sold an 85% interest in the permit to Oral Roberts University (ORU) for 85% of FCC-approved expenditures totaling $255,000; the FCC granted approval of the transaction on January 12, 1984.[10][11][12] However, ORU would later back out of the transaction that spring, at which time CCC was granted its next set of calls for the channel 47 permit, KDLF-TV (after the organization's radio station in Port Neches, Texas, now KBPO). The permit changed hands once again in July 1984, when CCC sold the permit to Television Communications Inc. (owned by local minister Jack Rehburg) for $410,000; Rehburg subsequently planned to call its proposed station KTCT (for "T</u>ulsa C</u>hristian T</u>elevision," which had served as the branding for KGCT-TV [channel 41, later KTFO and now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV] when Rehburg maintained a time-leasing agreement with that station from 1984 to 1985).[13][14][15]
The station first signed on the air on October 12, 1964 as WUCM-TV channel 19, licensed to University Center; the "UCM" stood for University Center Michigan. The station was initially affiliated with National Educational Television (NET) until 1970, when the present-day PBS replaced NET. In 1986, WUCM established a satellite, WUCX-TV channel 35 in Bad Axe, to better cover Michigan's Thumb area. In 1997, when the station first adopted the "Q-TV" branding, both stations changed their calls, with WUCM becoming WDCQ-TV, and WUCX becoming WDCP-TV.
KWHB launched a digital subchannel on virtual channel 47.2 in 2009, which initially served as a standard definition simulcast feed of the station's main channel. On June 17, 2014, KWHB-DT2 became an affiliate of classic television network Cozi TV, through an affiliation agreement announced on that date involving six of its seven television stations (with the exception of Indianapolis sister station WHMB-TV, which was exempted from the agreement due to an existing affiliation contract with Dispatch Broadcast Group-owned NBC affiliate WTHR and sister station WALV-CD).[33][34] On July 1, 2017, the subchannel became an affiliate of the family-oriented entertainment network Light TV.
During the 1990s, KWHB also began producing several local programs such as the public affairs program 47 Family Magazine, and ministerial programs like Life on the Vine, Full Gospel House of Prayer and Through the Bible with Les Feldick (the latter of which was syndicated to other television stations throughout Oklahoma and surrounding states); one such show, the Contemporary Christian music video program EQ Video, was syndicated to all eleven television stations that LeSEA owned at that time.[6] On July 11, 1993, Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) – which, as a byproduct of a corporate breakup tied to AT&T's 1999 purchase of TCI, would sell its Tulsa cable franchise to Cox Communications in February 2000 – began offering KWHB on channel 7, which expanded the station's distribution to cable television subscribers in the Tulsa area; KWHB was one of three Tulsa-area stations (along with KTFO and Claremore-based educational independent KRSC-TV [channel 35, now KRSU-TV]) to be given clearance on TCI as a result of rules included in the Cable Television Protection and Competition Act that allowed full-power television stations to elect for mandatory carriage on cable providers.[18][19]
In November 1995, KWHB entered into a news share agreement with KJRH-TV (channel 2) to produce twice-daily news and weather updates each weekday at 5:55 and 6:29p.m. The five-minute-long updates utilized the same anchors as those seen on KJRH's 5:00 and 6:00p.m. newscasts. These news updates continued to air until the agreement concluded in 1998.[40]
Local cable provider TCI dropped WGN from its lineup on December 31, 1996, when WGN, The Nashville Network and BET were removed to make room for five channels not previously carried on TCI's Tulsa system (Cartoon Network, TLC, Animal Planet, ESPN2 and HGTV). While this cut off access to the KWHB-preempted WB programs carried on the superstation feed to TCI's approximately 170,000 subscribers in the Tulsa area, it remained available locally on Heartland Cable Television, DirecTV, Dish Network and PrimeStar. WGN was particularly vulnerable to removal as it had lost access to much of the Chicago Bulls' 1996–97 game schedule due to a dispute between its Tulsa-based distributor, United Video Satellite Group (co-founded by Ed Taylor and Roy Bliss, founders of local TCI predecessor Tulsa Cable Television), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) over WGN's carriage of the team's telecasts outside of the Chicago market (TCI did not include its Oklahoma systems among those that retained the WGN national feed per an agreement reached with United Video that December, which kept the channel available on TCI in five Midwestern states).[23][24][25][26][27][28] The WB began to regret affiliating with a conservative religious station because of LeSEA's pre-emption policies, and began making plans to move its programming elsewhere. Muskogee-based KWBT (channel 19, now CW affiliate KQCW-DT) took over as the market's WB affiliate when it bowed on September 12, 1999, carrying The WB's entire prime time schedule (including the few shows that KWHB carried beforehand) as well as the Kids' WB lineup.[29][30] (For the reasons concerning The WB's prior partnership with KWHB, in preparation for the network's fall 1999 premiere week, KWBT included some returning WB prime time shows that station had declined to carry, as part of an evening catch-up block that aired during the week of September 12.)[29]
KWHB, virtual channel 47 (UHF digital channel 48), is a religious-secular independent television station licensed to Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. The station is owned by the Family Broadcasting Corporation. KWHB's studios are located in the Beacon Building on West 4th Street and South Boulder Avenue (west of the First Place Tower) in downtown Tulsa, and its transmitter is located near South 273rd Avenue East and the Muskogee Turnpike (near Broken Arrow) in unincorporated southeastern Tulsa County. On cable, the station is available on Cox Communications channel 7 in standard definition only.[1]
The station first signed on the air at 8:00 a.m. on September 12, 1999, as KWBT, becoming the Tulsa market's first full-time WB affiliate (the station referenced the affiliation in its call letters, which stood for "WB Tulsa"). The station originally operated from studio facilities located at the intersection of East 14th Street and South 69th East Avenue in southeast Tulsa. Alongside WB prime time programming and a blend of cartoons from both Kids' WB and via the syndication market, KWBT initially carried recent and classic off-network sitcoms and drama series, some first-run syndicated scripted programs, talk shows, court shows and reality-based lifestyle and dating series, and sporting events. Since KWBT signed on just as The WB was preparing to add a sixth night (Friday) to its prime time schedule, the station did not rely as much on feature films to fill its evening schedule like other stations that had joined The WB beforehand; channel 19 offered three movie presentations per week on weekend afternoons as well as a 7:00 p.m. movie showcase on Saturdays. Some of the syndication offerings on KWBT's initial lineup were previously unable to obtain carriage in the market due to the lack of available time slot clearances on Tulsa's five major network affiliates – NBC affiliate KJRH-TV (channel 2), CBS affiliate KOTV (channel 6), ABC affiliate KTUL (channel 8), Fox affiliate KOKI-TV (channel 23) and UPN affiliate KTFO (channel 41, now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV) – as well as KWHB. (For the reasons concerning The WB's prior partnership with KWHB, in preparation for the network's fall 1999 premiere week, KWBT included some returning WB prime time shows that station had declined to carry, as part of an evening catch-up block that aired during the week of September 12.)
After KGCT began a two-year operational cessation in February 1989, in order to allow original owner Green Country Associates to weigh sale offers for the station, KWHB acquired a selection of cartoon shorts and animated series that channel 41 previously carried on its schedule. As time went on, KWHB carried a broad mix of various syndicated programs including classic and some recent sitcoms (such as The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Mister Ed, The Little Rascals, Dennis The Menace (both the live-action sitcom and the animated series), The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and The Cosby Show), westerns (such as Bonanza), and animated series (such as The Jetsons, Yogi's Gang and DuckTales); it also carried a mixture of movies and sporting events on weekends. Televangelist and church service programming by this time typically aired during the prime time and overnight hours and throughout most of its Sunday lineup. Although the station ran a decent amount of general entertainment programming, the Tulsa edition of TV Guide never included KWHB in its listings for undisclosed reasons, an unusual situation given that the magazine had provided listings for full-time Christian television stations in its other regional editions.
On June 19, 1983, Dallas, Texas-based A. H. Belo Corporation acquired the six Corinthian Television properties (with WISH-TV and WANE-TV subsequently being spun off to LIN Broadcasting) from Dun and Bradstreet for $606 million; KOTV's purchase price was $41 million. The sale – which was considered to be the largest group purchase by a single broadcasting company up to that time, surpassing the price of the Gannett Company's $370-million purchase of Combined Communications Corporation in 1979 – received FCC approval on November 22, 1983, and was finalized in late January 1984. In 1984, KOTV and KJRH formed a consortium to have a new -tall tower constructed between Broken Arrow and Oneta, which was completed in 1985. Additional transmitters were subsequently installed to serve as auxiliary facilities for KOED and religious independent station KWHB (channel 47).
In April 1986, South Bend, Indiana-based LeSEA Evangelistic Ministries (eventually rechristened as Family Broadcasting Corporation in June 2018) – an organization headed by Lester Sumrall and sons Frank, Phillip and Peter Sumrall – purchased the station from Coit for $3.4 million.[16][17] After the acquisition was finalized in the fall of 1986, LeSEA changed the station's call letters to KWHB (standing for "W</u>orld H</u>arvest B</u>roadcasting"). The station initially retained some PTL programming and added other religious programs in the ministry's inventory and original programs (such as The 700 Club, LeSEA Alive, Lester Sumrall Teaches and televangelism programs from pastors such as Dwight Thompson, Ernest Angley and Jack Van Impe). By 1987, KWHB also added secular family-oriented entertainment programming on weekday afternoons between 2:00 and 7:00p.m. and from 9:00a.m. to 6:00p.m. on Saturdays; at the time, it began selling airtime during its secular programming to local and national advertisers to run commercials during program breaks.