The two stations share studios at the CentrePort Business Park in eastern Fort Worth; KXAS-TV's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.

Channel 5 informally signed on the air as WBAP-TV on September 27, to broadcast coverage of President Harry S. Truman's re-election campaign speech at the Texas & Pacific terminal building in downtown Fort Worth.

WBAP-TV officially commenced regular programming two days later on September 29, 1948, with two 10-minute specials at 7 p.m. that evening, respectively featuring speeches from Carter and general manager Harold Hough and a film from NBC dedicating the station's launch.

The station originally broadcast for four hours each evening on Wednesday through Saturdays, with test patterns airing during the late morning and late afternoon Monday through Saturdays; the station expanded its programming schedule to all seven days each week within six months, airing a cumulative total of between 35 and 40 hours of programming per week.

Ownership of Star-Telegram and the WBAP stations would transfer to Amon Carter Sr.'s heirs after he succumbed from the last of several heart attacks he had suffered over the previous two years on June 23, 1955.

However, NBC threatened to strip its affiliation from Channel 5 if it did not relocate its transmitter farther eastward to extend the station's signal deeper into the Dallas metropolitan area; reportedly, the network approached the owners of Fort Worth's other station, independent KFJZ-TV (channel 11, now KTVT), which had in 1962 moved its transmitter to the antenna farm in Cedar Hill.

To prevent the network from defecting, Carter's heirs—who were reluctant to comply to NBC's demands at first, out of their desire to continue Amon Carter Sr.'s legacy of pro-Fort Worth civic boosterism—agreed to move WBAP-TV's transmitter facilities to Cedar Hill and boost its effective radiated power to adequately cover Dallas; in the summer of 1964, it installed a transmitter at the Hill Tower (owned by the Dallas Newspapers) to feed the channel 5 antenna on a 1,500-foot (460 m) candelabra tower that was already shared by WFAA-TV and KRLD-TV (channel 4, now KDFW-TV); sister station WBAP-FM also moved its transmitter to this location.

The move to Cedar Hill allowed channel 5 to become the sole NBC affiliate for the entire Dallas–Fort Worth market on September 1, 1957, and subsequently, WFAA-TV became the area's exclusive ABC station.

During NBC's coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, WBAP-TV transmitted news reports conducted from its Broadcast Hill studios on the sniper-range shooting at the Presidential motorcade carrying Kennedy and Governor John Connally (who himself was injured in the shooting) in color; NBC broadcast the station's color feed during its coverage, which was otherwise transmitted in black and white from their New York studios.

Charles Murphy, who served as an anchor at the station, relayed word of Kennedy's death during emergency surgery at Parkland Hospital that afternoon.

Two days later on November 24, a remote unit that was loaned to WBAP-TV by KTVT management[2] and set up at the Dallas Police Department's downtown headquarters, awaiting the transfer of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald (who shot both men from an upper-floor window at the Texas School Book Depository overlooking Elm Street) to the Dallas County Jail, fed live images of the accused Presidential assassin being gunned down by nightclub owner Jack Ruby to the NBC network; it marked the first time that a murder had been witnessed live on U.S. network television.

In January 1973, Carter Publications announced it would sell WBAP-TV to LIN Broadcasting for $35 million; the Star-Telegram, WBAP and KSCS, meanwhile, were sold to Capital Cities Communications.

[3] The sales were finalized in early May 1974; due to FCC rules in place then that prohibited separately owned broadcast properties based in the same market from using the same callsign, channel 5's call letters were subsequently changed to the current KXAS-TV on May 16 of that year.

Through the consolidation of that station's operations with Channel 5, KXTX began airing rebroadcasts of its 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts each weeknight as well as select first-run syndicated programs seen on KXAS.

[20][21] The acquisition included rights to an existing purchase agreement for KXTX, which Telemundo had bought from Southwest Sports Television for $65 million on June 27.

[citation needed] On January 1, 2009, KXAS launched a tertiary subchannel on virtual channel 5.3, which served as a charter over-the-air affiliate of Universal Sports.

The facility incorporates four production studios; three control rooms that relay high definition content; a combined media asset management center and newsroom production suite for managing and editing content; and an expanded weather center within the production studio housing KXAS' main news set that contains upgraded software systems, an expert desk and two 80-inch (203 cm) touchscreen monitors; the station's traffic and sales departments, which were previously in separate areas of the Broadcast Hill studios, were also placed adjacent to the newsroom.

The station also aired any Dallas Stars games as part of NBC's NHL broadcast contract from 2006 to 2021; this included the team's appearance in the 2020 Stanley Cup Finals.

Channel 5 also aired Texas Rangers games as part of NBC's broadcast contract with Major League Baseball from their arrival in 1972 until 1989, and again for the postseason only from 1994 to 2000.

The Texas News was the highest-rated local television program in the United States during the station's early years and earned the first of what would be six RTNDA national awards for "Best Local Newscast" during its first year on the air; however, ratings for the program began to decline in the late 1960s amid competition from Dallas-based KRLD-TV and WFAA, which utilized a live-on-tape format that mixed filed reports with anchored segments presented in-studio.

Concurrent with the station's move to The Studios at DFW, KXAS donated its collection of news footage shot for The Texas News from the 1950s through the 1970s to the University of North Texas Libraries in Denton in November 2013; the film reels and accompanying script images were digitized by the university for availability to the public via the library's digital preservation network.

Among them Roberta "Bobbie" Wygant (the longest-tenured television personality in Texas and the first broadcaster in the Southwestern United States to present theater and movie reviews on television, who joined the station in 1948 as an entertainment reporter and later hosted various local programs, including Entertainment and the Arts and the newsmagazine Inside Area 5), Phil Wygant (who worked as an anchor/reporter from 1948 until he was laid off following LIN Broadcasting's acquisition of the station in 1974), Jack Brown (who served as a reporter from 1958 to 1980), Russ Bloxom (who served a lead news anchor from 1967 to 1979) and Jane McGarry (who served as an anchor and reporter from 1982 until she stepped down in July 2012, following her arrest on a misdemeanor DWI charge).

His popularity among viewers led to a successful grassroots campaign (which included threats of advertising boycotts by area businesses) urging KXAS station management to retain Taft after plans to replace him became public in 1983.

In 1967, Fort Worth native Bob Schieffer began his broadcast career at WBAP-TV as a reporter and anchor of the station's 10 p.m. newscast.

On March 28, 2000, the tower camera based in Sundance Square in Fort Worth caught footage of a multiple-vortex F3 tornado that struck the city's downtown area.

On September 7, 2007, KXAS-TV became the second television station in the Dallas–Fort Worth market (after WFAA) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

Segments conducted in-studio were initially the only content that was broadcast in the format, with field video footage being transmitted in 16:9 widescreen standard definition, before upgrading to HD in concurrence with the move to The Studios at DFW in September 2013.

[53] On June 20, 2016, KXAS began to implement the "Look N" graphics package designed for NBC's owned-and-operated stations by NBC ArtWorks, placing the station under the graphical standardizations applied to its fellow O&Os for the first time since 2012 (the "Look G" package used by KXAS from 2012 to 2014 has since been used by Nexstar Broadcasting Group for its NBC affiliates, including those in nearby markets such as KFDX-TV in Wichita Falls and KRBC in Abilene) and makes reference to the trademarking of the "Texas Connects Us" slogan that KXAS has used since 2012 (one of a handful of station slogans to have received trademark approval by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for exclusive and/or licensing use).

Channel 5 waited six minutes before cutting into a 2019 Cowboys Sunday Night Football game with a warning about a tornado that had touched down within the market.

[54] Conversely, in 2024, KXAS interrupted the end of a playoff game between the Los Angeles Rams and Detroit Lions for a report about light snowfall.