The two stations share studios on North Griffin Street in downtown Dallas; KDFW's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.

On August 22, 1946, one year and two days after it filed for the broadcast license, KRLD Radio Corp. amended its application to instead seek assignment on VHF channel 4.

Channel 4 officially signed on the air, as KRLD-TV, two weeks later on December 3, 1949, at 12:30 p.m., with a short inaugural program featuring speeches from Gooch and KRLD-AM-TV managing director Clyde Rembert dedicating the station's launch, followed by a broadcast of the CBS game show It Pays to Be Ignorant.

The first local program aired on the station that day was a college football game in which the Notre Dame Fighting Irish defeated the Southern Methodist Mustangs, 27–20.

Mr. Munn (hosted by an artist drawing visual interpretations of various song lyrics, predating the advent of the music video) and Confessions (a series featuring interviews with incarcerated criminals from the Dallas County Jail revealing why they committed the crimes they were convicted of).

The station initially operated from studio facilities located inside the Adolphus Hotel (between Commerce and Main Streets, north of the Times Herald Building) in downtown Dallas.

KRLD-TV served as the home base for CBS' network coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when suspect Lee Harvey Oswald (from an upper-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository) shot his rifle at sniper range at the Presidential motorcade carrying Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally as it had turned onto Elm Street.

Eddie Barker, who was KRLD-TV's news director at the time and had been with the station since it signed on fourteen years earlier as one of the original members of its news department staff, was the first person to announce Kennedy's death on television, relaying a message from an official at Parkland Hospital that Kennedy had succumbed from the gunshot wound as doctors conducted emergency surgery.

Because of a local press pool arrangement that was put in place that morning to cover Kennedy's speech at the Trade Mart downtown, Barker's scoop appeared live simultaneously on CBS, which had sent correspondent Dan Rather to report from Dealey Plaza, and ABC.

Two days later, a KRLD-TV field crew captured footage of Oswald's assassination by nightclub owner Jack Ruby as officers were transferring the former in handcuffs out of the Dallas Police Department's downtown precinct.

)[17][18][19] A helicopter-tower collision similar to the one that occurred 19 years earlier happened on January 14, 1987, when KDFW's Cedar Hill broadcast tower (which was jointly owned by KDFW and WFAA, via the Hill Tower, Inc. consortium involving their respective corporate parents) was hit by a Navy F-4 Phantom that was performing training exercises as it was on approach to the Dallas Naval Air Station, clipping several guy-wires.

)[20][21] In 1989, KDFW relocated its transmitter onto a new 1,400-foot (427 m)-tall tower constructed at the junction of Belt Line and Mansfield Roads in Cedar Hill, 1⁄4 mile (0.40 km) to the southwest.

On September 14, 1994, Gaylord Broadcasting reached an agreement to affiliate KTVT with CBS, in exchange for also switching its sister independent station in Tacoma, Washington, KSTW, to the network.

(WB network majority owner Time Warner would later file an injunction attempting to dissolve a previous agreement with Gaylord to turn KTVT, KSTW and KHTV in Houston [now CW affiliate KIAH, which became a sister station to KDAF when Tribune Broadcasting acquired the latter from Renaissance in 1996] into charter affiliates of The WB at that network's launch in January 1995.

KDFW switched to Fox on July 2, 1995, ending its relationship with CBS after 45½ years; with Fox switching from UHF to VHF, Dallas–Fort Worth became one of a handful of markets where all of the "Big Four" networks maintained affiliations with VHF stations (along with New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Tucson, Miami, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Honolulu, Boise and Anchorage; Reno joined this distinction in 1996, followed by Portland and Minneapolis–St.

On that date, KDAF – whose sale to Renaissance Broadcasting was finalized the following day on July 3—became an affiliate of The WB; Christian Broadcasting Network-owned KXTX-TV (channel 39, now a Telemundo owned-and-operated station), which reverted into an independent station, served as the market's original WB outlet during the network's first six months of operation under a temporary arrangement until it could affiliate with KDAF when Fox moved to channel 4.

[45][46] On September 5, 2018, a 34-year-old Michael Chadwick Fry crashed a silver Dodge Ram into KDFW–KDFI's Griffin Street studios around 6:12 am, while KDFW was broadcasting that morning's edition of Good Day.

The Dallas police temporarily evacuated most KDFW/KDFI employees – except for some who were placed in a secure part of the building to allow KDFW to provide coverage of the story – upon the discovery of a suspicious bag that was left behind, prompting bomb squad crews to investigate.

[47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] On January 14, 2025, Fox Television Stations broke ground on the future studios for KDFW/KDFI in the Las Colinas section of Irving on Royal Lane near the intersection of Bush Turnpike and I-635.

Opening by 2027, the facility will have little to no visible transmission infrastructure on-site and that role fulfilled by a full fiber connection to Cedar Hill with a modern studio and newsroom design, along with audio suites for spoken word projects such as podcasts.

KDFW did not acquire the local rights to the syndicated version, which was instead carried by rival ABC affiliate WFAA (under the title 8 Country Reporter).

Additionally, from 1998 to 2009, KDFW also served as an alternate carrier of Rangers baseball games produced by co-owned regional sports network Fox Sports Southwest for broadcast on sister station KDFI, which served as the team's official flagship station during that period; KTXA (channel 21) assumed the local over-the-air television rights to the Rangers in 2010.

Notably, in 1999 (Fox's last year with the NHL over-the-air broadcast contract), the station aired the Stars' first Stanley Cup Finals appearance as a Dallas-based franchise (the third overall, counting their 1981 and 1991 appearances that preceded the former Minnesota North Stars' relocation from Minneapolis in 1993), which saw the franchise defeat the Buffalo Sabres to win its first Stanley Cup (as Fox's NHL contract required it to split the Finals coverage rights with the league's cable partner, the decisive Game 6 of that series aired instead on cable through ESPN).

In November 1978, the station hired Clarice Tinsley (who joined KDFW from CBS affiliate and eventual sister station WITI in Milwaukee, which also became a Fox affiliate through the New World deal) to serve as anchor of its 10 p.m. newscast and conduct special assignment reports, the latter of which (through investigative reports and interviews on which she has been assigned) has earned her several journalism awards over her career with the station (including Associated Press, Emmy and Peabody Awards and a duPont-Columbia Citation for Excellence); as of 2016[update], she is currently the third longest-tenured overall and the second longest-tenured currently active television news personality in North Texas, and has had the longest tenure of any on-air staff member in KDFW's history (in the former category, Tinsley ranks behind Harold Taft, who served as chief meteorologist at KXAS-TV from its sign-on as WBAP-TV in 1948 until his retirement in 1991, and Bobbie Wygant, who served as an entertainment reporter for WBAP/KXAS from 1948 until her death in 2024).

[61] On May 12, 1986, to inaugurate the rollout of its new satellite news-gathering units, KDFW kicked off an ambitious three-week tour across Texas, in which the station conducted live remotes at different locations around the state each day for its early evening newscasts.

As it was returning from Van Horn (the first site of the tour) that evening, a Bell JetRanger used by the station as its newsgathering helicopter crashed after takeoff at Guadalupe Mountains National Park while pilot Irving Patrick attempted to navigate the chopper in strong wind speeds.

[69] Although ratings for its newscasts declined in the first couple of months after it joined Fox due to viewer confusion over the switch (which Whitaker acknowledged had also resulted in ratings losses at its competitors at that time), KDFW began regaining some of its news audience starting in the fall of 1995; it has since often beat its English-language competitors in the demographic of adults between 25 and 54 years old in certain time slots, particularly in the morning and at 9 p.m.

Starting in 2006, the Fox-owned stations began revamping their sets and graphics to be more closely aligned visually with Fox News Channel, along with the adoption of standardized "kitebox" logos.

On July 30, 2007, a Bell JetRanger helicopter leased by KDFW from CBS Radio crash-landed in a heavily wooded area near the Joe Pool Lake spillway (south of Camp Wisdom Road) in Grand Prairie, while it was making an emergency landing after the aircraft's engine lost power (which the National Transportation Safety Board determined was caused by the failure of one or more of the compressor blades for the fifth stage compressor) en route to a breaking news story in Fort Worth that morning.

To accommodate the expansion (which placed Good Day in direct competition with WFAA's news/talk program Good Morning Texas), Hanna Battah (who joined KDFW from CBS affiliate KBAK-TV and Fox affiliate KBFX-CD in Bakersfield in June to serve as weekend anchor of Good Day) was added as co-anchor of the first two hours of the program with a co-anchor to be named later, while Tim Ryan (who has anchored KDFW's morning newscast since joining the station shortly after the 1995 affiliation switch) and Lauren Przybyl (who joined KDFW in September 2009) being shifted to the 6–10 a.m. portion of the broadcast.