The station has a large network of broadcast translators that extend its over-the-air coverage throughout Utah, as well as portions of Arizona, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.

[6] The KSL stations operated as a division of the Deseret News until 1964, when Bonneville International was formed as the parent company for the LDS Church's broadcasting holdings.

KUTV continued to air one NBC program, Saturday Night Live, for five more months until January 1996, when it was moved to then-WB affiliate KOOG-TV (now CW owned-and-operated station KUCW).

[13] KSL-TV is one of the few remaining television stations in the United States that still "signs off" at night (though only nominally, because programming immediately continues afterward), doing so at 3:30 a.m. on Sundays.

[15] In 1987, the station was among several affiliates that announced that it would not air the children's animated series Garbage Pail Kids ahead of its originally scheduled premiere amid criticism from parental organizations over concerns about the show's violent content and humor ridiculing the handicapped and the perceived likelihood of it merely being a program-length ad for the controversial namesake toys and trading cards.

[14] KSL removed Picket Fences midway through its first season, partly due to objections over a January 1993 episode ("Nuclear Meltdowns") centering on a teenage girl who becomes pregnant through an incestuous plural marriage with a polygamist Mormon and the perpetrator's allusion that, although plural marriage within the LDS Church ceased after the 1890 Manifesto (issued in response to Congressional acts to disincorporate and seize assets of the church over the practice), many Mormons still held polygamist beliefs.

[20] The drama series returned to KSL in its normal network time slot in April 1993,[21] before being shifted to a one-day delay at 11 p.m. Saturdays for its second season in September 1993.

Unlike most of the later preemptions, while potentially objectionable content in the series were somewhat an issue for the station (NBC rebuffed KSL management inquiries about delaying SNL to midnight), the decision was largely made to retain its popular local sports discussion and highlight program SportsBeat Saturday.

[29] (KSL sponsors "Out in the Light", a campaign aimed at educating Utahns on mental, marital and sociological issues associated with viewing pornographic material.

on a Tuesday timeslot due to objections to the sitcom's storyline surrounding gay parenting, crude dialogue and potentially offensive characterizations.

(Other prime time series declined by the station for objectionable content have, by coincidence due to insufficient national viewership, been among the network's initial cancellation orders during their debut seasons.)

On April 29, 2013, KSL-TV pulled Hannibal after four episodes, due to the drama's graphic violent content and material revolving around the Hannibal Lecter series of novels and films, an action compared by executive producer Bryan Fuller to how Russian newspaper Pravda structured its news coverage to fit the Soviet Communist Party's narrative.

Other than the plausible outcome that locally originated programming in the daytime hour could allow KSL to attain much more ad revenue with a local program, no reason for the move was explicitly stated, with a common theory floated for the move being a storyline involving openly gay characters Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis (who later became the first gay couple to be legally married in-canon on a network soap opera), citing historical opposition within the LDS Church to same-sex relationships.

[39] (KSL began airing the network's overnight rebroadcast of NBC News Now's Top Story with Tom Llamas the season before in the timeslot vacated by Days.)

Even with its tradition of screening possibly objectionable programs, some, such as The Book of Daniel (which was not shown by several other NBC affiliates, especially in Bible Belt states) and a paid political message criticizing the Iraq War (which featured Cindy Sheehan) have been aired by the station.

That changed in 1965, when the station poached sportscaster Paul James (better known as the voice of BYU football and basketball) and weatherman Bob Welti from KCPX-TV and teamed them with anchor Dick Nourse.

In 2008, KSL-TV became the second television station in the Salt Lake City market (after KUTV, which converted in April of that year) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

According to media observers, channel 5's ratings slumped after Mark Willes became president of Deseret Management Corporation, the for-profit arm of the LDS Church and Bonneville's parent company, and abandoned the station's longtime focus on hard news in favor of "values-based" reporting.

KSL-TV also carried Universal Sports on its 5.2 subchannel until it began to be exclusively distributed through cable and satellite television in January 2012; it was replaced by Live Well Network in 2013.

As part of the SAFER Act, KSL-TV kept its analog signal on the air until June 26 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.