KAUZ-TV (channel 6) is a television station licensed to Wichita Falls, Texas, United States, serving as the CBS affiliate for the western Texoma area.

[7][8] On December 9, 1955, Rowley-Brown sold KWFT-TV to KSYD-TV Inc.—a consortium led by Sydney A. Grayson and Nat Levine, then-owners of Wichita Falls radio station KSYD (990 AM, now Farmersville-licensed KFCD), which ironically was co-owned with KFDX-TV under prior ownership two years earlier—for $75,000 plus $73,366.40 allocated for color and transmission equipment not yet in use; concurrently, Brown acquired John H. and E. H. Rowley's respective interests in KWFT radio.

On July 31 of that year, the station changed its call letters to KAUZ-TV, which were chosen as part of a contest held by the Harron group that was open to media agency and advertiser personnel.

(The calls were submitted by H. Wendell Eastling, a media director for Minneapolis-based Knox-Reeves Advertising, who won the grand prize of an MG sports car and a trip for two to Wichita Falls.

Also in 1967, KAUZ-TV was one of several stations nationwide to broadcast The Las Vegas Show, a short-lived late night program from the ill-fated Overmyer Network that ran for a few weeks.

On November 3, 1967, Mid-New York Broadcasting sold KAUZ-TV to Bass Brothers Telecasters—led by investor/philanthropist Perry R. Bass, then-owner of fellow CBS affiliate KFDA-TV in Amarillo and satellites KFDW-TV (now KVIH-TV, a satellite of Amarillo ABC affiliate KVII-TV) in Clovis, New Mexico, and KFDO-TV (now defunct) in Sayre, Oklahoma, and 25% owner of KAAR-TV (now NBC owned-and-operated station KNSD) in San Diego—for $3.1 million; the sale was approved by the FCC on April 12 of that year.

[17][18][19] In July 1970, two men who were hired to paint the mast on the station's transmitter tower—located on the premises of the KAUZ studio complex, which is said to be coordinated at one of the highest points within the city of Wichita Falls—lost their balance on the apparatus they were standing and fell several hundred feet to the ground; one man was killed, while another was seriously injured.

[22][23][24][25] Adams sold KAUZ, along with seven of its other television stations—WHOI in Peoria, Illinois, WWLP in Springfield, Massachusetts, WILX-TV in Lansing, KOSA-TV in Midland, WTRF-TV in Wheeling, West Virginia, WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin, and WSAW-TV in Wausau, Wisconsin—to Boca Raton, Florida–based Brissette Broadcasting (owned by media executive Paul Brissette) for $257 million in late 1991; the sale, approved by the FCC on December 24 of that year, was completed in February 1992.

[31][32][33][34][35] Benedek subsequently agreed to sell KAUZ to Chelsey Broadcasting in June 2002; the sale, completed on October 21, 2002, was part of a $30 million piecemeal group acquisition by Chelsey (a major creditor of Benedek) that also involved seven of KAUZ's sister stations (WHOI, WYTV in Youngstown, Ohio, KDLH-TV in Duluth, Minnesota, KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Missouri, KGWN-TV in Cheyenne, Wyoming, KGWC-TV in Casper, Wyoming and KHQA-TV in Quincy, Illinois) that Gray had chosen not to acquire.

The switch was part of a series of upgrades to KSWO and KAUZ's shared master control facility at the former's Lawton studio, which also allowed the seamless insertion of on-screen severe weather alert maps, news and school/event closing tickers, and Emergency Alert System tests during network and syndicated programming on both stations without downgrading HD content to standard definition.

Among the local programs aired by KAUZ in previous years were Kauzey's Korner (later titled Kauzmo's Kolorful Kartoons), a long-running weekday afternoon children's program that aired on channel 6 from 1963 to 1967, whose titular host "Kauzmo" (played by Ronald "Cosmo" Gresham, an outspoken political activist, two-time Hawaii Big Island mayoral candidate and one-time County Council candidate) was named for the station's call letters.

After Gresham relocated to Hawaii years later, the character of "Kauzmo" would later become known as "Cosmo", when he hosted a public access program on Jones Spacelink/Hawaiian Cablevision of Hilo titled "Cosmic Express" (named after his Cosmic Express newsletter),[62] which featured news, political commentary, law study, spirituality, music (often played by Cosmo himself on flute or other instruments he made himself) and guest interviews (the Dalai Lama was among that program's notable guests).

An interview segment similar to Donna's Notebook, which is used mostly to promote local and area events, remains an integral part of KAUZ's noon newscast to this day.

During the late morning of April 3, 1964, a devastating tornado (later retroactively rated as an F5 on the Fujita Scale) swept across the northern portion of Wichita Falls and neighboring Sheppard Air Force Base.

KAUZ-TV interrupted regular programming that morning to provide a live tornado warning in which the image of the supercell thunderstorm was shown on the station's weather radar by then-meteorologist Ted Shaw.

The station's weather staff received permission to relocate a large, heavy studio camera outside the Channel 6 studios on Seymour Highway, and pointed toward the tornado—which initially appeared as a large, rotating dust cloud—as it approached the northwest portion of Wichita Falls, with Shaw and reporter Dee Fletcher providing commentary, warning viewers of the approaching funnel, and cameraman Carl Nichols recording the footage.

[69][70] In 1977, KAUZ became the first television station in the area to feature a mixed-gender anchor team on its newscasts (a trend which had steadily become commonplace on news-producing television stations in other media markets across the nation); that year, Walker was teamed up with co-anchor Kay Shannon on the 6 and 10 p.m. broadcasts, a move which served as the linchpin for the start of a nine-year tenure in which KAUZ-TV took first place in the local news ratings against rivals KFDX and KSWO.

About less than five minutes into the newscast, KAUZ-TV and several other television and radio stations in the Wichita Falls area were knocked off the air due to power outages resulting from the damaging storms.

For February 2010, the newly rebranded KAUZ saw a decline in its ratings, with the weekend evening newscasts, in particular, seeing its audience share numbers drop by nearly half.

In the 2010 ratings periods, including the February, May, July and November sweeps, Nielsen reported that viewership for KAUZ's newscasts continued to struggle in all time slots.

Chris Horgen, who assumed co-anchor duties of for the weeknight 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts in 2007, had previously served as the station's sports director for several years.

For most of the JSA/SSA's existence, KSWO and KAUZ retained fully separate local news programs, due to the stations' distance from one another and their focus on different portions of the Wichita Falls–Lawton market.

Then-owner Hoak Media had filed a request to the FCC that March (with approval being received for the hardship waiver on March 31, despite the fact that KAUZ did not meet the technical criteria to obtain it) to permit the shutdown of KAUZ's analog signal ahead of the federally determined transition date of June 12, in order to install its digital antenna on the tower mast that housed the station's analog transmitter.