Channel 9 signed on the air as commercial station KFI-TV on August 25, 1948,[5][6] owned by Earle C. Anthony alongside KFI radio (640 AM).

[7] However, the station was originally licensed as experimental W6XEA about 1940, and in 1944 applied for the call letters KSEE (which are now used by the NBC affiliate in Fresno, California).

[8] Channel 9 has been an independent station for virtually its entire history, though it carried DuMont programming from 1954 up until that network's 1956 demise.

[10][11] Channel 9's engineers threatened to go on strike in 1951, leading Anthony to sell the station to the General Tire and Rubber Company in August of that year.

[12] A few months earlier, General Tire had purchased the Don Lee Broadcasting System, a regional West Coast radio network (the original Don Lee television station, KTSL (channel 2), was sold separately to CBS; it evolved into future sister KCBS-TV).

Guests ranged from William F. Buckley to Sammy Davis Jr. and the political movers and shakers in Southern California.

[16] Six years later, the FCC stripped WNAC-TV of its license for numerous reasons, but largely because RKO had misled the commission about corporate misconduct at General Tire.

On August 11, 1987, FCC administrative law judge Edward Kuhlmann found RKO General unfit to be a broadcast licensee due to numerous cases of dishonesty on both its part and that of parent company GenCorp (the renamed General Tire), including fraudulent billing and lying about its ratings.

The FCC strongly advised GenCorp to divest its remaining properties to avoid the indignity of additional license stripping without any compensation.

[27] In the midst of RKO's corporate issues, the company reached terms to sell KHJ-TV to Westinghouse Broadcasting in November 1985.

A short time later, RKO General agreed to sell the station to The Walt Disney Company;[29] however, this transfer was also held up for over a year for the same reasons.

Disney then bought the channel 9 license from Fidelity for $105.4 million and KHJ-TV's non-license assets (intellectual property, studios, etc.)

[14] During the RKO/Fidelity/Disney transition, KHJ-TV's city of license was changed to the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk, also as part of the FCC settlement.

[32] On December 2, 1989—the first anniversary of its ownership, Disney changed channel 9's callsign to the present KCAL-TV, and relaunched the station as "California 9", selected from a shortlist of three possible monikers.

The station also added a few more family-oriented off-network sitcoms and syndicated programs and then broadcast the popular anime series Dragon Ball Z,[35] that lasted well into 1997.

In the early 1990s, family sitcoms were gradually phased out and KCAL added more first-run syndicated talk, reality and court shows, as well as newsmagazine series.

On March 30, 1992, Disney agreed to sell KCAL-TV's license to Pinelands, Inc., then the parent company of channel 9's former New York City sister station, now called WWOR-TV.

Disney would have received a 45% ownership stake in Pinelands, allowing for increased original programming to be shared between the two reunited stations.

[36] The planned merger never materialized; Pineland would agree to sell WWOR-TV to Chris-Craft Industries, then-parent of KCOP (channel 13).

In 1996, The Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC, owners of ABC West Coast flagship KABC-TV (channel 7).

With duopolies now allowed by the FCC, the station was purchased by CBS, then a subsidiary of Viacom, on February 14, 2002;[41] the deal was finalized on June 1, 2002.

When CBS/Viacom bought KCAL-TV, broadcasting industry observers speculated that UPN's programming would move to KCAL from KCOP-TV.

Indeed, during the station's two-decade licensing dispute, its large slate of sports programming was essentially the only thing that kept it as part of the Southern California television landscape.

As of 2023, KCAL has the rights to six games a season from the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, produced by Bally Sports West.

In 2014, KCAL lost rights to the Dodger telecasts to the cable-exclusive regional sports network SportsNet LA, which is co-owned by the team and Charter Communications.

The latter 35 years were the NBA's longest consecutive station-team broadcast partnership, and coincided with the Lakers' golden eras of the 1980s and early 2000s.

4 p.m. co-anchors Greene and Martin, who were then also the 6 p.m. anchors on KCBS-TV, were also said to have been on the layoff list, but both decided to retire from television upon the June 2009 expiration of their contracts.

Local news headlines from the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and MediaNews Group newspapers were displayed on a ticker, "street team" submissions of video and photos from viewers were featured, reporters ended stories with NewsCentral rather than the individual station brands, and microphone flags and news vehicles were branded to show both stations' logos at once (previously, the KCBS and KCAL logos were displayed on alternating sides).

[63] On December 10, 2009, CBS Television Stations hired Steve Mauldin to replace Patrick McClenahan as president and general manager of the KCBS-KCAL duopoly.

[66] On December 10, 2014, KCAL announced it would be dropping its hour long 2 p.m. and half-hour 3 p.m. newscasts before the end of the year to be replaced by Judge Mathis and The People's Court.