KOKH-TV

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KOKH-TV, virtual channel 25 (UHF digital channel 24), is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. The station is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, as part of a duopoly with CW affiliate KOCB (channel 34). The two stations share studio and transmitter facilities located on East Wilshire Boulevard on the city's northeast side (situated to the adjacent east of the respective studio facilities of the duopoly of CBS affiliate KWTV-DT [channel 9] and MyNetworkTV affiliate KSBI [channel 52], and the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority [OETA] PBS member network).

On cable, the station is available on Cox Communications channel 12 and digital channel 712 in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, and on channels 12 or 13 on most other cable systems (as well as on AT&T U-verse, and satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network, all of which carry KOKH on its over-the-air virtual channel) in the market.

History

Prior history of channel 25

The UHF channel 25 allocation in Oklahoma City was originally assigned to KTVQ, which first signed on the air on November 1, 1953; it operated as an ABC affiliate, assuming the affiliation from primary NBC affiliate WKY-TV (channel 4, later KTVY and now KFOR-TV). KTVQ was hampered by low viewership as only a small percentage of television sets in the Oklahoma City area were capable of receiving UHF stations since set manufacturers were not required to equip televisions with tuners to receive stations on that band until the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the All-Channel Receiver Act in 1961; even with the passage of the law, UHF tuners were not included on all newer sets until 1964. In addition, KTVQ also faced competition from fellow ABC affiliate KGEO-TV (channel 5, now KOCO-TV) in Enid, which transmitted a signal that reached the northern portions of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

Despite an effort led by National Affiliated Television Stations (NATS) and ABC to help the station emerge from bankruptcy, KTVQ ceased operations on December 15, 1955. KTVQ's future was sealed in February 1956, when the FCC refused a request for the station on VHF channel 12 – which was allocated to the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, who protested the proposal as "tantamount to scrapping the whole table of educational television assignments" – under special temporary authorization, until the station recovered financially, a proposal which was supported by Governor Raymond D. Gary. ABC programming subsequently returned to WKY-TV as a secondary affiliation (KGEO-TV displaced WKY as the network's Oklahoma City affiliate when it moved its operations and changed its city of license from Enid to Oklahoma City in 1958).

KOKH station history

As a non-commercial educational station

KOKH-TV first signed on the air on February 2, 1959 as a non-commercial educational independent station. The station was founded by Oklahoma City Public Schools, which acquired the rights to the UHF channel 25 license years earlier, as part of a settlement in KTVQ's bankruptcy hearing. KOKH originally operated from studio facilities based out of the district's Broadcasting Center on North Ellison Avenue and Northwest 17th Street in the city's Mesta Park neighborhood, which also served as a production facility for National Educational Television affiliate KETA-TV (channel 13, now a PBS member station), which the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) signed on as Oklahoma's first educational television station in April 1956. In its early years under the district's ownership, channel 25's programming consisted of instructional and lecture-based telecourse programs televised in cooperation with the Oklahoma State Department of Education, which offered the course subjects attributable for college credit.

As a commercial independent station

Oklahoma City Public Schools exited the broadcasting industry in the summer of 1979, when the school district sold KOKH to Blair Broadcasting (a subsidiary of New York City-based John Blair & Co.) for $3.5 million. Through the purchase, Blair intended to convert channel 25 to a commercial license, a move that was possible as the FCC had reserved the channel 25 allocation in Oklahoma City for commercial use. On October 1 of that year at 6:00 a.m., KOKH switched to a general entertainment format, becoming the first commercial independent station in Oklahoma, leaving KETA-TV as Oklahoma City's sole educational television station. In its early years as a commercial operation, KOKH was a typical UHF independent featuring a mix of cartoons, classic sitcoms, religious programs, and a limited amount of sports programming. Feature films were heavily emphasized on the station's schedule during this period, to the point that the station was promoted as "Oklahoma's Great[est] Movie Station," a slogan it used until 1986; KOKH typically carried four films a day on Monday through Fridays – two each in the afternoon, and one to two films per night in prime time – and five to six films per day each weekend.

KOKH gained a competitor exactly one month later on November 1, when General Media Corp. and Oklahoma City Broadcasting, Inc. signed on KGMC (channel 34, now CW-affiliated sister station KOCB), which employed a similar programming format. This was followed by the launch of KAUT (channel 43) on September 24, 1980, a station founded by Golden West Broadcasters that initially featured an all-news format during the daytime hours and programming from subscription service VUE at night, before transitioning to a general entertainment format almost a year later. By that point, the Oklahoma City market had three commercial independents that each competed for the best syndicated programming. During the early 1980s, KOKH extended its over-the-air coverage throughout most of western and north-central Oklahoma through the sign-on of low-power UHF translators in Elk City, Hollis, Erick, Strong City, Woodward, Ponca City and Ardmore as well as a repeater in Quanah, Texas.

Because of its status as the strongest of Oklahoma City's three independent stations, in the spring of 1986, KOKH was approached by News Corporation to become a charter affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company in advance of the upstart network's October launch. However, channel 25 turned the offer down, as its management chose to continue operating KOKH as an independent station instead, believing that taking the affiliation would complicate the station's movie-focused evening schedule. Fox subsequently approached KAUT's owner at the time, Rollins Communications, about affiliating with channel 43, reaching an agreement to become the network's Oklahoma City affiliate on July 25.

In July 1986, John Blair & Co. was approached by private equity firm Reliance Capital Group to initiate a friendly takeover of the broadcasting group; Reliance submitted a tender offer to acquire 61% of Blair's 11.5 million common shares for $31 per share, and subsequently exchange all remaining shares for a 15-year debenture at a $20.75 face value (along with 2.5 shares in Blair's direct-to-mail marketing subsidiary Advo-System Inc.); Blair also offered to pay a $1.50 dividend on each of the unacquired shares, if Reliance completed the tender offer acquisition. Blair considered the offer to prevent a hostile takeover by minority stockholder Macfadden Holdings, which planned to use the proceeds from its 1985 sale of pornographic magazine Cheri to acquire full control of Blair, a sticking point for the company's shareholders who were concerned about the ideological conflicts between the stations and Macfadden's adult-oriented publications. The FCC denied Reliance's attempted appointment of a trustee to obtain stock and facilitate the takeover, pending a qualification review by the agency; Macfadden subsequently filed a stay motion – which was granted by a New York Appeals Court that August – to require Reliance Capital to return all stock in John Blair & Co. to the company's shareholders.

On November 5, 1986, Blair sold KOKH, and NBC affiliates KSBW-TV in Salinas and KSBY in San Luis Obispo, California to Nashville-based Gillett Communications for $86 million, as part of a restructuring of the company to focus on expanding its Spanish language network NetSpan and to pay off debt incurred by Reliance's purchase of Blair; the sale was finalized on December 31 of that year. Gillett subsequently transferred KOKH, Fox affiliate WRLH-TV in Richmond, Virginia, NBC affiliate WEAU-TV in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and CBS affiliates KOLN in Lincoln, Nebraska (as well as Grand Island satellite KGIN) and WWMT in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Busse Broadcast Communications – a group founded by former Gillett president Lawrence A. Busse, and operated as a trust company held by the children of George N. Gillett – to address ownership restrictions related to Gillett's purchase of a majority stake in Storer Communications; the transaction was finalized on August 27.

Aborted sale to Pappas Telecasting

Although Oklahoma City was just barely a top-40 Nielsen market at the time, the number of households in the 34-county market area that owned at least one television set was not nearly large enough for what were essentially three independent stations; the supply of first-run and acquired programming on the syndication market was also insufficient to completely fill the schedules of KOKH, KGMC and KAUT. In the summer of 1988, Visalia, California-based Pappas Telecasting announced that it would purchase KOKH from Busse for $3.6 million. A proposal that accompanied the deal would have allowed KOKH to become the market's dominant independent by reducing its competition: Pappas proposed a complex $30-million asset transfer in which it would purchase the programming inventories of Heritage Media-owned KAUT – including its rights to the Fox affiliation – and Seraphim Media/Oklahoma City Broadcasting-owned KGMC and integrate them onto channel 25's schedule. Pappas also planned to change the station's call letters to KOKC-TV (the KOKC calls are now used by a news/talk radio station on 1340 AM). Heritage would donate KAUT's license and transmitter facilities to OETA for $1 million, while Seraphim would sell KGMC to religious broadcaster, which would have resulted in the station carrying a mix of religious programs as well as programming from the Home Shopping Network (HSN) (which the station already carried as overnight filler programming through the Home Shopping Spree service). Pappas would also enter into a 25-year lease with OETA to give the authority permission to operate the KAUT transmitter facility for $1 per year, and offered to contribute an additional $1 million on the pretense that the purchase was successfully completed. OETA planned to help fund the conversion of channel 43 into a non-commercial educational station through start-up grants, including a $75,000 grant donated by KOCO-TV management. The plan was later revised when OETA filed an application with the FCC to purchase KGMC as a contingency measure, with the intent of having Heritage sell KAUT to a religious entity.

However, Governor Henry Bellmon disapproved of OETA's involvement in the transaction, as he believed that the authority would constantly request additional state funding to operate its existing stations and KAUT, as it had previously stated that it did not have enough funding to adequately run the state network. Agreeing with Bellmon's assessment, the OETA funding appropriation bill for FY1990 that went before the Oklahoma Legislature incorporated stipulations prohibiting the authority from using state funds "for any operational or capital expense of the proposed second educational television channel in Oklahoma City," and from proposing that additional state funding be appropriated to finance the channel 43 acquisition and programming conversion if it did not obtain sufficient private funding to complete the transaction. In addition, Governor Bellmon inquired about a state audit of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority to address allegations from an unnamed former employee that OETA management had misused public donations, and that station employees were required to attend foundation-related meetings and worked for the foundation's pledge drive on state and additional uncompensated time. Although the deal would receive FCC approval, Pappas unwittingly curtailed it as was unable to finalize the purchase. On February 3, 1989, after Busse management had earlier denied an offer by Pappas to extend the deadline to complete the purchase past January 31, Busse formally terminated its purchase agreement with Pappas. KOKH, KAUT and KGMC continued to compete against each other as general entertainment independents for two more years. While KOKH remained relatively profitable and KAUT had seen its standing improve as a Fox affiliate, KGMC struggled mightily, ultimately filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 1989, amid a debt load of $3.37 million.

As a Fox affiliate

In 1991, Heritage Media implemented a pared down version of the earlier Pappas proposal in a transaction that resulted in the company selling its existing Oklahoma City station to acquire another. On April 23 of that year, Heritage announced that it would purchase KOKH-TV from Busse Broadcast Communications, and donate the KAUT license and transmitter facility as well as the station's master control equipment to OETA. The purchase/donation agreement – which was contingent on approval of Heritage's acquisition of channel 25 – included a two-year option for OETA to purchase KAUT's remaining assets for $1.5 million. Nearly five months later, on August 15, Heritage moved KAUT's inventory of syndicated programming and films, and its Fox affiliation rights over to KOKH, which began identifying itself as "KOKH Fox 25". The station also hired 30 of channel 43's former employees (including KAUT general manager Harlan Reams, whom KOKH appointed to the same position), and acquired other equipment and intellectual property that had belonged to KAUT. Meanwhile, OETA – under a broadcasting pilot initiative between the authority's Board of Directors, the OETA Foundation Board of Trustees, Heritage Media, PBS, and management with the Children's Television Workshop, funded in part from private funding donated to contribute to the conversion – converted channel 43 into a PBS member station, featuring a mix of PBS programming and programs syndicated to individual public television stations that were repurposed from the main OETA member network, along with additional children's, lifestyle and telecourse programs that could not be included on OETA's main schedule (channel 43, which adopted the KTLC call letters in 1992, later reverted to an entertainment format as UPN affiliate KPSG in June 1998, following OETA's sale of the station to the Paramount Stations Group).

KOKH was programmed as a de facto independent station in its first two years as a Fox affiliate, though not to the same extent as many Fox-affiliated stations were in the years following the network's 1986 launch; by the time the affiliation moved to channel 25, Fox was preparing to expand its prime time programming to five nights a week (adding programming on Thursdays and Fridays to join its existing Saturday and Sunday lineups). Still, until Fox began offering programming on a nightly basis with the addition of programming on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings in January 1993, KOKH continued to air a movie at 7:00 p.m. on nights when network programs were not offered. The station also began lessening its reliance on movies during this period, due to the growing difficulty of broadcast stations in acquiring film content as the number of cable television networks increased. Channel 25 also became reliant on content from the network's Fox Kids block for its children's programming inventory, which resulted in many syndicated children's programs that KOKH had aired to occupy portions of the weekday daytime and Saturday morning time periods being relegated to early morning time slots as well as around the network block's morning and afternoon lineups.

In August 1996, Heritage Media began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The following month, it asked for stockholder approval of a 2-for-1 forward stock split, which was later approved. That fall, News Corporation expressed an interest in purchasing outstanding stock belonging to Heritage Media at $20.50 per share. On March 17, 1997, News Corporation announced that it would purchase Heritage's broadcasting properties for $1.35 billion; News Corporation's main interest in purchasing Heritage Media was the in-store marketing subsidiary ACTMEDIA, which, through its integration with the Rupert Murdoch-owned company's existing marketing operations, would make it the world's largest in-store marketing company. FCC approval was dependent upon Heritage divesting most or all of its stations, as an acquisition of the company's broadcast properties would place News Corporation over the agency's national ownership cap, which, at the time, limited the collective reach of an individual group's television station portfolio to at or below 35% of the U.S. (by 1997, News Corporation had operated 22 Fox owned-and-operated stations and one independent station through its Fox Television Stations subsidiary, including twelve that the company had recently acquired through its acquisition of New World Communications).

On July 16, 1997, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it would buy Heritage Media's television and radio stations from News Corporation for $630 million. However, the deal would create ownership conflicts between Sinclair's existing television stations and Heritage's outlets in several cities, including Oklahoma City's KOCB, which Sinclair had acquired from Superior Communications in 1996. At the time, FCC media ownership rules restricted broadcasting companies from owning more than one commercial television station in all Nielsen-designated markets; however, since the agency did not count such agreements as de facto ownership, Sinclair initiated local marketing agreements – a concept long established in radio that it brought to television in 1991, through the formation of a virtual duopoly between Fox affiliate WPGH-TV and independent station WPTT (now MyNetworkTV affiliate WPNT) in Pittsburgh – to operate stations that it could not own legally in other markets. As part of a series of sales made by the company to address antitrust concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice's San Francisco field office over the deal, on August 7, 1997, the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair sold channel 25 to Sullivan Broadcast Holdings for $60 million. Only three days after Sullivan finalized its purchase of KOKH, on February 4, 1998, Sinclair reversed course on its earlier move to alleviate the conflict between KOKH and KOCB by exercising an option to buy the former from Sullivan for $60 million; the deal preceded Sinclair's $100-million cash and debt acquisition of the entire 13-station Sullivan group on February 24, a deal which was finalized on July 1. Under the terms of the deal, Sinclair began operating KOKH under a time brokerage agreement with Sullivan (which the company retained as a separate entity to operate KOKH and three other Sullivan-owned Fox affiliates, WTAT-TV in Charleston, South Carolina, WVAH-TV in Charleston, West Virginia and WRGT-TV in Dayton, Ohio). With KOCB acting as the senior partner, this arrangement placed KOKH in the unusual position of being the junior partner in a virtual duopoly with an affiliate of the lower-rated WB network (the Big Four network affiliate normally serves as the senior partner in most virtual or legal duopolies involving a station affiliated with a minor network).

In the spring of 1998, Glencairn, Ltd. announced that it would acquire KOKH, and transfer the LMA to that entity. The family of Sinclair Broadcast Group founder Julian Sinclair Smith owned 97% of Glencairn's stock (Glencairn was to be paid with Sinclair stock for the purchases), which would have effectively made the KOKH/KOCB combination a duopoly in violation of FCC rules of the time; Glencairn owned eleven television stations nationwide that Sinclair operated under local marketing agreements, and subsequently announced plans to sell five of its stations to Sinclair outright. This prompted the Rainbow/PUSH coalition (headed by Jesse Jackson) to file petitions to the FCC to deny approval of the transaction, citing concerns over a single company holding two broadcast licenses in one market and arguing that Glencairn passed itself off as a minority-owned company (its president, former Sinclair executive Edwin Edwards, is African American) when it was really an arm of Sinclair that used the LMA to gain control of the station. The FCC levied a $40,000 fine against Sinclair in December 2001 for illegally controlling Glencairn, although it chose to approve the acquisitions. However, as noted in a 2003 ruling on the matter by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the issue involving KOKH was rendered somewhat moot, as on August 5, 1999, the FCC began allowing broadcasters the ability to form duopolies between television stations, provided that eight independent owners remain in a market once a duopoly is formed and one of the stations does not rank among the four highest-rated. On November 17, 1999, Sinclair, Sullivan and Glencairn restructured the deal, allowing Sinclair to acquire KOKH from Sullivan Broadcasting directly as part of a $53.2 million cash and debt forgiveness acquisition involving four other stations – Mission Broadcasting-owned UPN affiliates WUXP-TV in Nashville and WUPN-TV (now MyNetworkTV affiliate WMYV) in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Montecito Broadcast Group-owned independent station KFBT (now CW affiliate KVCW) in Las Vegas – along with acquiring five stations from Glencairn (whose control would be fully transferred from Edwards to Carolyn Smith, widow of Julian Smith) in an $8-million all-stock purchase; the deal created the Oklahoma City market's first television duopoly with KOCB.

During the late 1990s, KOKH lessened its reliance on running cartoons and classic sitcoms, and began acquiring more talk shows, reality series and court shows, although more recent sitcoms remained as part of its schedule. After Fox discontinued the Fox Kids weekday block in December 2001, KOKH continued to carry the children's program lineup that Fox retained on Saturday mornings (which was relaunched FoxBox in September 2002, and was later branded as 4Kids TV from September 2005 until December 2008, when the network stopped providing children's programming after it declined to renew its agreement with time-lease partner 4Kids Entertainment). The station subsequently switched its weekday daytime schedule, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., to a lineup dominated by court shows (such as Divorce Court, Judge Mathis and The People's Court); this reliance on court shows reached to the extent that it broadcast every court show available in syndication during the 2006-07 season. In September 2002, KOKH de-emphasized the "Fox 25" branding, opting to verbally identify the station alternatingly as "Fox Oklahoma City" or "Oklahoma City's Fox" in on-air promotions (though its channel 25 position continued to be featured within the station's logo); KOKH reverted to using the "Fox 25" branding full-time in 2006. On March 5, 2012, KOKH and KOCB became the last stations in the Oklahoma City market to begin carrying syndicated programs, station promos and other commercials in high definition.

On May 8, 2017, Sinclair Broadcast Group entered into an agreement to acquire Tribune Media – which has owned NBC affiliate KFOR-TV and independent station KAUT-TV since December 2013 – for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in debt held by Tribune, pending regulatory approval by the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. As KOKH and KFOR rank among the four highest-rated stations in the Oklahoma City market in total day viewership and broadcasters are not currently allowed to legally own more than two full-power television stations in a single market, the companies may be required to sell either the KFOR/KAUT duopoly or the KOKH/KOCB duopoly to another station group in order to comply with FCC ownership rules preceding approval of the acquisition; however, a sale of either duopoly to an independent buyer is dependent on later decisions by the FCC regarding local ownership of broadcast television stations and future acts by Congress.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

Channel	Video	Aspect	PSIP Short Name	Programming
25.1	720p	16:9	KOKH-HD	Main KOKH-TV programming / Fox
25.2	480i		Charge	Charge!
25.3			WeatherNation	WeatherNation TV

KOKH-DT2

In August 2010, Sinclair signed a groupwide affiliation deal with country music-oriented digital subchannel service The Country Network (later renamed ZUUS Country, before reverting to its original name) to the 28 of the company's stations. On November 4 of that year, KOKH-TV launched a digital subchannel on virtual channel 25.2 to serve as an affiliate of The Country Network; ZUUS Country was replaced by Grit on December 31, 2014, as part of a multi-station affiliation agreement between Sinclair Broadcast Group and network parent Katz Broadcasting. On February 28, 2017, KOKH-DT2 disaffiliated from Grit to become a charter outlet of the similarly formatted Charge!, a movie-focused action-adventure network owned as a joint venture between Sinclair and MGM Television.

KOKH-DT3

On December 8, 2014, KOKH launched a digital subchannel on virtual channel 25.3, which became an affiliate of WeatherNation TV; the subchannel subsequently began to be carried by Cox Communications on digital channel 219.

Analog-to-digital transition

KOKH-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 25, on February 17, 2009, to conclude the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 24, using PSIP to display KOKH-TV's virtual channel as 25 on digital television receivers.

As part of the SAFER Act, KOKH kept its analog signal on the air until March 3 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.

Programming

KOKH-TV currently carries the entirety of the Fox network's programming schedule. Although from the block's launch in September 2014 until September 2016, the station did not carry Xploration Station, a live-action educational program block distributed by Steve Rotfeld Productions that is syndicated primarily to Fox stations, due to existing contracts held by Sinclair Broadcast Group to carry E/I-compliant programs acquired via syndication (the block aired instead on MyNetworkTV affiliate KSBI during that timeframe); through an agreement between Rotfeld and Sinclair that expanded the block's Fox affiliate clearance to the latter's stations, KOKH began carrying Xploration Station on September 10, 2016, running the first two hours of the block on Saturdays (leading into Fox's Weekend Marketplace infomercial block) and the final hour on Sunday mornings.

Syndicated programs broadcast by KOKH-TV (as of September 2016) include The Wendy Williams Show, Judge Judy, Hot Bench, The People's Court, Modern Family and TMZ. The station also produces Living Oklahoma, an hour-long talk and lifestyle program hosted by Mitch English (who replaced original co-host and KOKH morning traffic reporter Shelby Cashman in February 2017, coinciding with a revamp of the station's morning newscast under the new title Good Day OK and Cashman's added duties as sole anchor of the 11:00 a.m. newscast) and Meg Alexander (who formerly worked as an anchor at KFOR-TV from 1997 to 2015), which premiered on October 5, 2015; the program currently airs weekday mornings at 9:00 a.m.

On November 10, 2005, KOKH and KOCB became the flagship stations for the Oklahoma Lottery, which held its televised Pick 3 and Cash 5 evening drawings at the duopoly's Wilshire Boulevard studios. The drawings – which were simulcast on KOCB – aired nightly at 9:20 following the "B" block of the 9:00 p.m. newscast; channel 25 aired them on tape delay on nights when the 9:00 p.m. newscast was delayed due to Fox Sports event overruns. After reductions to the Oklahoma Lottery Commission's budget resulted in the replacement of the televised draws with drawings conducted via random number generator at the Oklahoma Lottery offices in July 2009, KOKH aired a rundown of winning numbers for both of the lottery's original online games and Hot Lotto during the 9:00 p.m. newscast. From when Oklahoma became a participant in the multi-state drawing in January 2006 until the stations stopped carrying all lottery results in 2013, KOKH/KOCB also aired live Powerball drawings each Wednesday and Saturday, which KOKH aired following the prime time newscast (live drawings for Mega Millions – of which Oklahoma became a participant in January 2011 – were only available in the Oklahoma City market through WGN America, which discontinued national carriage of the live Powerball and Mega Millions drawings in 2013; the winning numbers for those drawings and other Oklahoma Lottery games are now only shown on a ticker seen during KOKH's morning and 11:00 a.m. newscasts).

Sports programming

As an independent station, during the early and mid-1980s, KOKH carried some locally produced and syndicated sporting events. Among these broadcasts were college basketball games produced by MetroSports (a sports syndication service created as a joint venture between Anheuser-Busch and Katz Communications), and some rodeo competitions held in Oklahoma City (including the National Finals Rodeo), which were produced by its "Studio 25" production unit. In October 1983, KOKH reached an agreement with MetroSports to acquire the local television rights to broadcast college basketball games from the Big 8 Conference. The package – which gave the station local rights to televise games involving the Oklahoma Sooners and the Oklahoma State Cowboys, whose games had respectively been carried by NBC affiliate KTVY (now KFOR-TV) and independent station KAUT through the 1982-83 season – consisted of games that aired on Saturday afternoons and on either Tuesday or Wednesday nights during the NCAA Division I Basketball season.

Since September 1994, KOKH-TV has served as the television partner of the Dallas Cowboys for the Oklahoma City market, holding local rights to air various team-related programs during the regular season (including the Cowboys Postgame Show, Special Edition with Jerry Jones and the head coach's weekly analysis program The Jason Garrett Show, along with specials such as the Making of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Calendar and postseason team reviews). Most Cowboys telecasts carried on KOKH are those carried by Fox, which through the network's contract with the National Football League (NFL), holds primary broadcast rights to the National Football Conference (NFC). In addition to carrying Fox-televised games involving in-conference opponents, since 2014, Cowboys games carried on the station also include certain cross-flexed games against opponents in the American Football Conference (AFC) that were originally scheduled to air on CBS. Most Cowboys preseason games not televised by Fox or by other broadcast or cable networks are carried over-the-air locally on sister station KOCB through the duopoly's agreement with the team's syndication service.

News operation

As of September 2016, KOKH presently broadcasts 39½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (7½ hours on weekdays, and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays). In addition, the station produces the sports highlight and discussion program Fox 25 Sports Sunday (hosted by sports director Myron Patton, sports anchors Curtis Fitzpatrick or Sam Gannon, and WWLS-FM (98.1) radio host Jim Traber), airing Sunday evenings at 10:00 p.m.; it also produces a 15-minute sports wrap-up segment, which is treated as a standalone program, that airs Sunday through Fridays during the prime time newscast. KOKH also provides local weather updates for Cumulus Media-owned radio stations WWLS-FM, KYIS (98.9 FM), KQOB (96.9 FM), KKWD (104.9 FM), KATT-FM (100.5) and KWPN (640 AM). KOKH's newscasts regularly place fourth among the market's news-producing stations, behind local news and network programs on KFOR, KOCO and KWTV, although its morning and 9:00 p.m. newscasts beat the KFOR-produced newscasts on KAUT.

From October 1, 1979 to July 1991, KOKH aired two-minute-long newsbriefs each hour, branded as Newstouch 25, from 6:00 a.m. until sign-off (usually around 1:30 a.m.); some morning and late night updates were pre-recorded. Among those who anchored the updates were Mike Monday, Karie Ross, Felicia Ferguson (who won the Miss Oklahoma pageant in 1985), Janis Walkingstick and Kelly Ogle (now evening anchor at KWTV). Until the late 1980s, the station also produced Weathertouch 25, two-minute-long weather updates that aired on the half-hour during the broadcast day; the segments (featuring weathercasters such as Ross Dixon, Dan Satterfield and Kevin Foreman) utilized the first colorized radar scan converter and satellite picture colorizer in Oklahoma, and used live radar data from the National Weather Service Terminal Doppler site at Will Rogers World Airport. The station also produced several public affairs and interview programs including Meet The Mayor (an interview program featuring discussions and viewer questions with the Mayor of Oklahoma City), Woman to Woman (which featured discussions about women's issues) and Sunday PM (a weekly talk show focusing on prominent people, issues and events in Oklahoma City).

After KOKH discontinued Newstouch 25 upon taking over the Fox affiliation in 1991, channel 25 aired very limited local programming (among them, a weekly program produced for the station's Fox Kids Club chapter, the "Fox 25 Kids Club") for the next four years. In a June 1994 interview with The Daily Oklahoman, Harlan Reams, KOKH's president and general manager at the time, firmly stated that the station would not offer a newscast, even with the likelihood that channel 25 would see an increase in viewership and revenue through Fox's acquisition of the rights to the National Football Conference television package. Reams' positioning of KOKH as an entertainment-only programming destination went to the extent of preempting the Fox News Extra update segments (produced by the network's New York City O&O WNYW) that aired during commercial breaks within Fox's prime time lineup at the time with station promotions.

After the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Fox urged KOKH station management to develop a full-scale news department. Reams (who would subsequently be replaced as the station's president and general manager by Steven M. Herman, who helped oversee the department's creation), ultimately conceded to develop a news department for the station. Plans for the new news operation began in August 1995, with a premiere date set for the late spring of 1996; KOKH also hired Bob Schadel (who joined KOKH after an eleven-year tenure as assistant news director at KOCO-TV) as its news director. The newscast was structured to match the "Fox attitude" in an effort to court younger viewers, but shied away from incorporating sensationalistic content in favor of a more conventional style that would appeal to Oklahoma City viewers. Newscasts returned to KOKH when the current news department began operation on May 27, 1996, with the premiere of a 30-minute newscast at 9:00 p.m. that initially aired on Monday through Friday evenings. Debuting as The Nine O'Clock News (which was retitled as the Fox 25 Primetime News at Nine in 2001), it was first anchored by veteran Oklahoma City news anchor Jack Bowen (who had previous tenures at KOCO and KWTV) and Burns Flat native Kirsten McIntyre (who had previously worked as an anchor/reporter at KAUZ-TV in Wichita Falls). Bowen and McIntyre had previously co-hosted Ground Zero, a half-hour special produced by KOKH – which aired on February 27, 1996, four months prior to the newscast's launch – that showed previously restricted footage recorded by first responders in the aftermath of the Murrah Building bombing. Joining them on the newscast were Tim Ross as chief meteorologist (who brought a quirky approach to his weather segments, even naming the end-of-segment extended forecast graphic as the "Fearless 5-Day Forecast") and Mike Steely as its inaugural sports director (Steely – who worked with McIntyre while he served as sports director at KAUZ years prior – retained his job as sports talk radio host at KEBC [1340 AM, now KGHM; the KEBC calls now reside on 1560 AM], before moving to WWLS [now KWPN] in 1998).

Heritage Media and KOKH invested over $1 million in the development and staffing of the news operation, which included the purchase of Avid nonlinear editing equipment, one of the first stations in the United States to use the Internet-based editing technology. The station also converted its main "Studio 25" production studio at the Wilshire Boulevard facility into a "working newsroom" set, which was similar in design to the "NewsPlex" set used by ABC affiliate KETV in Omaha from 1996 to 2015 (production of channel 25's newscasts remained in the newsroom until it was moved to a dedicated HD-ready news set built by Devlin Design Group in a renovated production studio within the building on April 13, 2014, which features a dedicated weather center, several large widescreen monitors and a multi-purpose area used for interviews, and the morning and Sports Sunday broadcasts). As the market's first prime time newscast, KOKH held steady in the 9:00 p.m. timeslot, even with competition from network programs on KFOR, KOCO-TV and KWTV. Under the direction of Henry Chu (who replaced Schadel as news director in the late summer of 1998), KOKH expanded the weeknight editions of the newscast to one hour in August 1998; this was followed by the addition of hour-long Sunday edition on September 12, 1999 and an hour-long Saturday edition that premiered the following month on October 2 (the latter of which, along with the Friday editions, was originally co-anchored by Brad Wheelis and Colleen O'Quinn, who both resigned in 2000 after failing to reach renewal terms in their contract negotiations). Prior to the expansion, The Nine O'Clock News only aired as a one-hour broadcast to cover significant breaking news events (such as for the death penalty sentencing of Murrah bombing conspirator Timothy McVeigh on June 13, 1997). To further cement its status as an alternative for KFOR, KWTV and KOCO's half-hour 10:00 p.m. shows, Chu also intended to expand the number of stories included on each night's broadcast, incorporating more national and international coverage than that covered on the market's other late newscasts.

Over time, however, the news department began experiencing heavy turnover with its on-air staff that continues to this day. Ross was fired in early 1999, citing that his style did not work in a serious weather market, and replaced him with the more conventional Chuck Bell; Steely resigned from KOKH in June 1999 over creative disagreements with station management and difficulties working two sports broadcasting jobs, and was replaced by incumbent sports reporter Zach Klein. Bowen and McIntyre continued to co-anchor until November 2000, when Bowen left after his contract was not renewed. Turnover in the news department was so significant that in 2000, the station temporarily used solo anchors for the weekday and weekend newscasts, while Chuck Bell conducted the weather segment seven nights a week. As is the case with competitor KOCO, the fairly heavy turnover that KOKH has experienced with its on-air staff has led to some unfamiliarity that some of its on-air personalities have in the market.

In late 2002, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced plans to launch News Central, a local/national format that would provide national news segments that would be syndicated via centralcasting to each of the company's news-producing outlets for insertion into their local newscasts. When NewsCentral launched in January 2003, KOKH began incorporating pre-recorded weather reports produced at production facilities in the ground floor of Sinclair's Beaver Dam Road headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland on the Friday and Saturday editions of the Primetime News at Nine, as well as The Point (now titled Behind the Headlines), a one-minute conservative political commentary feature by Sinclair's then-vice president Mark Hyman. When the station began carrying the News Central inserts on a regular basis on March 31, 2003, local news segments continued to be based out of the KOKH studios and the station maintained its own locally based anchors and reporters; however, the station laid off staff in its weather and sports departments (including chief meteorologist Amy Gardner, weekend evening meteorologist Greg Whitworth, sports director Zach Klein, and sports anchor/reporters Ari Bergeron and Mark Ross) as well as eight other production employees with the news department. Sports segments as well as Sunday through Thursday weather segments shown during the prime time newscast began to be produced out of the Hunt Valley facility, while local sports headlines began to be conducted by the program's main news anchor. The first time that KOKH programmed news outside its established 9:00 slot was in February 2004, when it premiered the Fox 25 Late Edition, a half-hour weeknight 10:00 p.m. newscast (it is currently one of more than three dozen Fox stations in the U.S. that produces a newscast in the traditional late news timeslot, 10:00 p.m. in the Central Time Zone). In 2005, the station debuted Oklahoma's Most Wanted, a weekly segment based on the format of former Fox series America's Most Wanted that aired during the Saturday edition of the 9:00 p.m. newscast, which profiled wanted criminals being sought by law enforcement for various felonies.

As part of corporate cutbacks at Sinclair's news operations, the company shuttered its News Central division with all national segments ending on March 31, 2006. KOKH was one of the few Sinclair-run stations not affiliated with ABC, NBC or CBS that participated in the venture to retain their news department; it subsequently restored in-house weather and sports segments, hiring Scott Padgett (who had been doing weather segments for KOKH under the News Central format from Sinclair's Hunt Valley studios) as chief meteorologist, and Greg Whitworth (who had previously worked at the station as a meteorologist from 1999 until he was laid off upon the outsourcing of forecasts under the News Central format) as weekend evening meteorologist for the restored weather department. That December, The station restarted its sports department, when Myron Patton (then a WWLS radio host, who formerly served as a sports anchor at KOCO-TV from 1988 to 1994, and is currently the longest-serving member of KOKH's on-air news staff) and Liam McHugh were hired as sports anchors. KOKH concurrently launched Fox 25 Sports Sunday that month as a 15-minute Sunday evening sports wrap-up program at 9:45 p.m.; it would expand into a half-hour weekly broadcast at 10:00 p.m. three months later on March 25, 2007, adopting a panel discussion format. On April 9, 2007, KOKH debuted the Fox 25 Morning News, a three-hour newscast that originally aired weekday mornings from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. (the program would add a fourth hour at 5:00 a.m. on January 4, 2010; this was followed on January 31, 2011, by the debut of an hour-long extension of the newscast at 9:00 a.m., Good Day Oklahoma, featuring a mix of news updates and discussions, interviews and community event information).

In September 2007, KOKH was sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on allegations of racial and gender discrimination against crime reporter Phyllis Williams (one of the original members of the station's reporting staff, who worked at KOKH from the start of news operations in 1996 until late 2007). The suit – which sought back compensation, and compensatory and punitive damages – claimed that Williams was paid a lower salary than white female reporters of similar comparability and male reporters of various races, and that station management did not offer her a contract until several months after she filed a discrimination complaint with the EEOC in 2005; in March 2011, KOKH management reached a settlement with Williams, awarding her $45,000 in damages and additional monetary consideration. On October 11, 2010, KOKH became the first Oklahoma City area station to stream its local newscasts, breaking news and severe weather coverage on smartphone and other mobile devices. On August 14, 2013, KOKH became the fourth overall and the last remaining English-language station in the Oklahoma City market to begin broadcasting its newscasts in high definition. On July 6, 2014, the station debuted The Middle Ground, a Sunday morning discussion program focusing on state and national political issues that was produced by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs; the program was cancelled in April 2015.

In February 2014, KOKH began producing an online-only weeknight 5:00 p.m. newscast streamed on the station's website; channel 25 began airing the 5:00 p.m. program as an hour-long early evening newscast on September 1, 2014, replacing sitcom reruns that had long aired at that hour. On March 7, 2016, KOKH launched an hour-long newscast at 11:00 a.m., the first midday newscast to air in that timeslot in Oklahoma City; the station accordingly overhauled its morning schedule, with the Fox 25 Morning News being shortened to a four-hour broadcast while Living Oklahoma was moved to the 9:00 a.m. hour (the Good Day titling previously used for the former 9:00 a.m. hour of the morning newscast was reinstated on the morning show on January 28, 2017, when the program was relaunched as Good Day OK).

On-air staff

Notable current on-air staff

• Mitch English – co-host of Living Oklahoma
• Jim Traber – commentator

Notable former on-air staff

• Liam McHugh – sports anchor (2007–2009); now with NBC Sports
• Jessica Willey – reporter (1998–2000); now at KTRK-TV in Houston

External links

• Official website
• KOCB website

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