The two stations share primary studio facilities on Bridge Street (off I-30), east of downtown Fort Worth, and advertising sales offices at CBS Tower on North Central Expressway in Dallas.

KTXA was one of several Paramount-owned stations to be charter outlets for the United Paramount Network (UPN) in 1995 and merged its operations with KTVT in 2001 after a corporate buyout of CBS.

[2] Shlenker's consortium signed a deal with Oak Industries, owner of the ON TV subscription television service, to outfit its proposed STV system in the Metroplex in 1979;[3] on March 31, 1980, the FCC granted a joint settlement by which Block's group was reimbursed for its expenses and dropped out to allow the Shlenker group to be granted the construction permit.

[5] Construction proceeded more slowly than that; in October, the newly named KTXA purchased an industrial building on Randol Mill Road in nearby Arlington to be occupied by its own operation as well as that of ON TV itself.

All three were part-time STV operations, KTWS-TV carrying Preview from American Television and Communications and KNBN-TV providing VEU, owned by Golden West Broadcasters.

Milton Grant, who had joined the Shlenker group and became intimately involved in operations, built up channel 21 as an aggressive independent in program purchasing.

In 1982, KTXA—already unwilling to cede more hours to subscription broadcasting—and Oak entered into a dispute over these broadcasts, which the station felt were indecent, and KTXA won in a court fight to uphold its right to cancel ON TV programs to which it objected.

In contrast to the other two hybrid startups in the Metroplex that "merely appeared", Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News wrote that channel 21 had "burst into living rooms like a world-champion encyclopedia salesman", with nearly ubiquitous billboards, high-profile programming, and an emphasis on weekend movies.

In the Metroplex, VEU had bought Preview's business in September 1982, integrating the two systems over the next several months;[16] further, the loss of the adult programming led to subscriber cancellations.

[17] The Shlenker–Grant group had set up another Texas television station in late 1982, KTXH in Houston, which carried a similar mix of programming (but never broadcast an STV service).

[21] At the same time Taft acquired a Fort Worth television station, it attracted the attention of an activist investor from the city who increased his stake over the course of 1985 and 1986: Robert Bass, who sought to raise his ownership in the company to 25 percent.

The NBA's Dallas Mavericks moved to KTXA in 1984 after their previous station, KXAS-TV, came under pressure to stop preempting NBC network shows; channel 21 carried 10 games and WFAA-TV another five.

[28] The company was to pay Salomon Brothers $200 million on January 1, 1988, and missed the first payment deadline, having been unable to lure investors to its junk bonds even before Black Monday.

[27] While TVX recapitalized by the end of 1988,[33] Salomon Brothers reached an agreement in principle in January 1989 for Paramount Pictures to acquire options to purchase the investment firm's majority stake.

[44] That same year, the Mavericks returned to KTVT and KTXA after a three-year deal with KSTR-TV (channel 49) was cut short by that station's impending sale and conversion to Spanish-language programming.

[45] On January 24, 2006, CBS Corporation and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner announced that the two companies would respectively shut down UPN and The WB and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW; the day of the announcement, it was revealed that 11 of CBS Corporation's 15 UPN affiliates would become CW stations.

[47][48] The merger of networks, however, left out KTXA and two other CBS-owned UPN outlets, as 16 Tribune Broadcasting stations, including KDAF—regarded as one of the strongest affiliates of The WB[49]—were selected.

[52] In 2010, KTXA entered into a five-year agreement with the Texas Rangers to show 25 baseball games per season (primarily on Friday nights), complementing the Mavericks and high school sports as well as syndicated college telecasts.

[55][c] After these agreements ended, KTXA continued to regularly serve as an overflow home for the Rangers, Mavericks and Stars on Fox and Bally Sports Southwest.

The newscast, the national portions of which originate at CBS's news and innovation lab in Fort Worth, also airs on nine other CBS-owned CW affiliates and independent stations.