Owned by and named for the Business Men's Assurance Company, it was the second independent station for Kansas City to sign on the air within twelve months.

[7] KBMA-TV, named for Business Men's Assurance,[8] continued to exist only on paper for another four and a half years after being assigned to channel 41.

[10] The first telecast was made on the afternoon of September 28, 1970: after a welcome message from general manager Bob Wormington, the first program was the live cartoon show 41 Treehouse Lane, featuring host Ed Muscare.

Shortly before KCIT began broadcasting, Grant proposed to buy a controlling stake in KCIT-TV, donate the studio equipment purchased for KBMA-TV and the channel 50 physical plant to local public television station KCSD-TV to become a two-channel operation, and move KCIT-TV to channel 41.

[25][26][27] One of these new local programs was All Night Live, wraparound segments around films and classic reruns in the overnight hours; Muscare returned to the station as host.

At the end of 1985, the cable systems in Wichita, Kansas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, removed channel 41 from their lineups, citing program duplication to other services; the loss of the Royals, the original reason for their addition in Wichita; copyright fees the systems paid to broadcast the distant station; and poor reception of KSHB-TV by microwave.

[37] Wormington's replacement was Charlotte Moore English, the first woman and first Black person to be a general manager in Kansas City broadcast history.

[39] On May 23, 1994, as a result of Fox outbidding CBS for the rights to partial rights to the National Football League, New World Communications reached an agreement with Fox parent News Corporation in which the latter company purchased a 20 percent equity interest and reached a multi-year affiliation agreement with New World.

[41] Earlier in the month, New World had announced the purchase of WDAF-TV from Great American Communications alongside three other major-market stations.

[50] On the first day of the switch, Willard Scott broadcast the weather for The Today Show from the front lawn of the studios; later that week, Tom Brokaw anchored the NBC Nightly News from Kansas City.

[51][52] In April 1996, Scripps-Howard Broadcasting took over the operations of KMCI (channel 38) in Lawrence, Kansas, under a local marketing agreement with then-owner Miller Television;[53] that August, the station dropped its home shopping programming and relaunched as "38 Family Greats", in part utilizing programming to which channel 41 had held the rights but had not been able to air since the 1994 affiliation switch.

[54] Exercising an option from the 1996 pact with Miller,[53] Scripps bought KMCI outright for $14.6 million in 2000, forming a legal duopoly with KSHB.

[55] In July 2003, KSHB and KMCI relocated their transmitter facilities to an 1,164-foot (355 m) tower at the Blue River Greenway in the Hillcrest section of southern Kansas City.

[59] A jury found in 2019 that KSHB-TV retaliated against former reporter Lisa Benson Cooper, who is Black; she was fired in 2018 after suing Scripps two years prior, alleging she had been passed over for job opportunities because of her race.

Scripps alleged that she had not applied for the positions and cited other reasons, including social media posts, for her suspension and termination.

[62] After moving into the Oak Street studios, KSHB-TV continually made noise about starting a full-length nightly newscast of its own, beginning with the 1982 hiring of a news director.

The 15-minute 10 p.m. newscast had no traditional anchors—stories were read by a rotation of existing reporters and two announcers already heard on local radio—and prompted the station to expand its news staff from six to twelve people.

[65][66] Despite the shorter length, the newscast—which used zippy graphics and segment titles—gave almost as much time to news coverage as the full-length newscasts on the local network affiliates (though with a heavier focus on national stories), with abbreviated weather and sports reports.

[71] Mark Olinger was hired as news director; he had last worked at KSTW, an independent station in the Seattle market that produced local newscasts.

[72] There, he had come under fire and ultimately quit in the middle of a ratings period, having orchestrated the layoffs or demotions of several veteran on-air personalities.

The original Sunday–Thursday anchors were Pam Davis, a former soap opera actress and reporter in Sacramento, California, and Jim Condelles, who had last worked in Indianapolis.

[39] While the newscast made heavy use of video, the format also de-emphasized weather, presented in a forecast running about 40 seconds each night, and lacked sports completely.

[78] It initially did little to change the young-skewing format adopted as a Fox affiliate, though the set was lightened to better match the NBC Nightly News.

[81] By this time, the newscast was adopting a more mainstream format, and Olinger and executive producer Jeff Burnside departed in December.

[95] The early 2010s also saw the station expand its morning newscast back to a 4:30 a.m. start,[96] add a 4:30 p.m. newscast in 2011 and expand it to a full hour at 4 in 2013,[97][98] and win the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for breaking news for its coverage of the natural gas explosion that leveled JJ's Restaurant in downtown Kansas City.

[99] Under a six-year agreement, KSHB and KMCI replaced KCTV as the official broadcast partners of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2019, giving the stations exclusive rights to team programming, including preseason contests beginning in 2020, plus marketing opportunities.

[102] The relationship between the Scripps stations and Sporting Kansas City continued through 2022, after which Apple assumed the rights, local and national, to all MLS teams.

[103][104] In September 2005, KSHB debuted a locally produced mid-morning talk show titled Kansas City Live.