John Toole "J. T." Griffin—the owner and president of the Griffin Grocery Company, a Muskogee-based wholesaler and manufacturer of condiments and baking products, states that he inherited from his father, John Taylor Griffin, after the elder company co-founder died in 1944—became interested in television broadcasting around 1950, after noticing during one of his commutes that many homes in the Oklahoma City area had installed outdoor antennas to receive the signal of primary NBC affiliate WKY-TV (channel 4, now KFOR-TV), the first television station ever to sign on in Oklahoma, which began operation on June 6, 1949.

On September 5, 1951, the Oklahoma Television Corporation—a consortium led by Griffin (who, along with sister Marjory Griffin Leake and brother-in-law James C. Leake, became the company's majority owners in July 1952, with a collective 92.7% controlling interest) and investors that included former Oklahoma Governor Roy J. Turner, company executive vice president Edgar T. Bell (who would later serve as channel 9's first general manager), and Video Independent Theatres president Henry Griffing (who acted as a trustee on behalf of the regional movie theater operator)—filed an application for a construction permit to build and license to operate a television station on VHF channel 9.

(Under FCC procedure, the Commission's Broadcast Bureau board decided on license proposals filed by "survivor" applicants at the next scheduled meeting following the withdrawal of a competing bid.)

Instead of using the KOMA calls assigned to the radio station, the Griffin group chose instead to request KWTV (for "World's Tallest Video") as the television station's call letters, in reference to the transmission tower that was being built behind its studio facility (which was also under construction at the time) on open land near Northeast 74th Street and North Kelley Avenue; the land plot was purchased by KOMA in 1950, with the intention of developing it for a television broadcast facility.

This created an issue for a then-ongoing and complex transaction in which RKO was to have acquired WRC-TV and WRC-AM-FM (now WTEM and WKYS) in Washington, D.C., from NBC, trade WNAC-TV (now defunct; former channel allocation now occupied by WHDH), WNAC-AM (now WRKO) and WRKO-FM (now WBZ-FM) in Boston to NBC in exchange for the WRCV television and radio stations (now KYW-TV and KYW (AM)) in Philadelphia, and sell the Washington-based WGMS radio stations (now WWRC and WTOP-FM) to Crowell-Collier Broadcasting.

[42] Philco—which protested the 1957 license renewal of WRCV-TV-AM to NBC amid questions over the legality of its purchase of the stations from Westinghouse in exchange for WTAM-AM-FM and WNBK television (now WKYC) in Cleveland the year before—took issue with whether RKO's interest in KWTV violated FCC ownership rules.

Addressing this, in August 1962, RKO agreed to sell its stake in channel 9 to minority stockholders Roy Turner and Luther Dulaney, increasing their individual interests in the station to 18.75%.

)[66] The former Kelley Avenue facility was donated to the Langston University Department of Communications for its broadcast journalism program, although KWTV continues to lease the land for its heliport and weather radar.

)[69] Partly as a result of the January 2021 launch of its 9 a.m. newscast, KWTV's weekday schedule relies very heavily on local newscasts and CBS network programs; with only two hours (one hour in daytime and 90 minutes in the evening and late night) not reserved to local and network shows, it has the least weekday programming time allocated to syndicated content among Oklahoma City's major commercial television stations.

For most of its run on the station, KWTV aired the telethon on a three-hour tape delay following its 10 p.m. newscast on the Sunday preceding Labor Day because of CBS entertainment and sports programming commitments.

[70] For this reason, KWTV elected not to continue airing the telethon for the September 2011 broadcast, when it was reduced from its original 21½-hour format to a six-hour prime time telecast on the night before Labor Day.

In September 1993, the station began carrying The Price Is Right on a one-hour delay to air syndicated programs during the 10 a.m. hour, forcing The Young and the Restless to be moved concurrently to 3 p.m. After it had considered preempting the talk show because of contractual issues with its late-night syndication lineup shortly before it debuted that month, KWTV became one of a handful of CBS-affiliated stations to receive permission to air the Late Show with David Letterman on a half-hour delay, so as not to displace a secondary run of Jeopardy!

Seven years before Griffin Communications acquired the latter station, KWTV and KOTV in Tulsa partnered to simulcast three games involving the state's two Central Hockey League franchises, the Oklahoma City Blazers and the Tulsa Oilers, during the league's 1993–94 regular season; the respective sports directors of both stations at that time, Bill Teegins and John Walls, conducted play-by-play for the broadcasts, with KWTV sports anchor Ed Murray (who would later become a news anchor in 1999, and remain in that role until his retirement from television news in 2013) doing color commentary.

On July 24, 2015, Griffin announced an agreement with the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) that would return high school football coverage to KSBI after a five-year sabbatical; as a byproduct of the deal, KWTV also maintained partial over-the-air rights to the OSSAA Class 5A and 6A football championships, which were split between the station's main channel, its News 9 Now subchannel and KSBI.

[81] KWTV has long had a rivalry with KFOR-TV, vying with that station for first place as the most-watched television newscast in the Oklahoma City market in most news timeslots.

In 1968, the station hired Paul R. Lehman as a weekend anchor and assignment reporter, becoming the first African American to work as a television reporter in the Oklahoma City market; given the lingering racial climate in the southern United States after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lehman's appointment was not without controversy, as some viewers who were displeased with his appointment called into the station's phone switchboard to complain, some of whom went so far as to lodge death threats against him.

In November 1972, urban affairs reporter Andrew Fisher—while covering a staff briefing that followed the commission's monthly meeting—interviewed Oklahoma Securities Commission chairman Charles E. McCune about a security registration requirement for Los Angeles-based commodities broker Goldstein, Samuelson, Inc. McCune made an anti-Semitic comment regarding the company's fitness for operation based on its name and, later, with full knowledge he was being recorded by Fisher, said "I think they are Jewish and I think that they are skunks—the name and what they've done," when asked what prompted the earlier remark.

Olson's tenure at the station (ending with her departure in 1980 to become Atlanta bureau correspondent for CBS News, with Olson being replaced on the 6 p.m. broadcast by Debi Faubion) saw the airing of a documentary she wrote and produced in cooperation with the National Kidney Foundation, Gift of Life, which chronicled four kidney dialysis patients awaiting transplants; the special led to the passage of a state law that created an organ donor registry and donor ID information on Oklahoma identification cards and drivers' licenses.

[90] That year, KWTV became the first television station in the Oklahoma City market to transition from film to videotape to record news footage, with the purchase of camcorder equipment it branded as "Live MiniCam 9".

In 1979, the station began utilizing a helicopter to provide coverage of breaking news events and severe weather, with the introduction of "Hot Shot 9" (renamed "Ranger 9" in 1981).

The station enacted a series of staffing changes to shore up its news viewership, resulting in the firings of longtime anchors Bert Rudman and Phil Schuman, and reporter Debra Lane during the early 1980s.

Replacing Adams and Faubion on the 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts were Roger Cooper and Patti Suarez, who, alongside chief meteorologist Gary England and sports director Jim Miller (later replaced by the fall of 1981 by John Snyder, who had previously served as KWTV's sports director in the mid-to-late 1970s), led channel 9 to an intense battle with and, by the mid-1980s, eventually overtake KTVY for the top ratings spot in evening news.

[96][97] In 1986, KWTV rolled out a satellite news-gathering unit, "Newstar 9" a transportable video uplink system that the station used to cover news and weather events around and outside of Oklahoma.

[101][102][103][104] Three years after his unexpected firing, in July 1990, Roger Cooper returned as anchor of the 6 and 10 p.m. editions of Newsline 9, after the station failed to renew Bowen's contract.

That August, this relationship extended to the consolidation of KWTV and The Oklahoman's online presence under the "NewsOK" banner, which incorporated in-depth reporting combined with video supplied by the station, and utilized existing web staff from the respective properties.

(Ironically the Gaylord family, who ran the newspaper from 1907 until parent company OPUBCO Communications Group sold it to The Anschutz Corporation in 2011, built and signed on competitor KFOR-TV in June 1949, and owned that station until 1976.)

In February 2016, KWTV launched "Drone 9", a quadcopter—the first to be used for newsgathering purposes in the Oklahoma City market—that would be used to provide aerial footage as a supplement to "Bob Mills SkyNews9 HD".

Most of these advances were attributed to Seiling native Gary England, who was often referred to as "Oklahoma's #1 meteorologist" in station promotions and newscast introductions for most of his tenure with channel 9.

[147][148] It was first utilized to detect a violent F4 tornado that caused extensive damage in Union City on May 24, 1973[148][149] (the original film footage from the accompanying televised warning was featured in station-produced weather promos in later years).

)[152][147][148] In 1991, England convinced station management to hire a software development firm to create an application, which would be dubbed "Storm Tracker", an automated computer tracking system that projected the arrival time of precipitation at a particular locale.