The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, and maintains a news bureau and advertising sales office at the intersection of West Villard Street and State Avenue North in Dickinson; its transmitter is located southwest of the city.

KXMA's second digital subchannel is considered a semi-satellite of KXMB-TV in Bismarck, which is the flagship station of the four-station KX Television regional network.

KXMC-TV in Minot is the oldest station and former flagship of the KX group, while KXMB provides master control and some internal operations for the entire network.

KXMA-DT2 airs a time-shifted simulcast of KXMB in Mountain Time for most of the day, clearing all network and syndicated programming as provided through its parent.

Although the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had combined all of western and central North Dakota into a single market in the mid-1950s, this wouldn't be fully realized for another three decades, mainly because Dickinson is in the Mountain Time Zone.

Then, in 1966, KOTA-TV in Rapid City planned to sign on KHSD-TV (channel 11), a satellite station in Lead, South Dakota; to extend its coverage into northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

Stanley Deck, KDIX's general manager at the time, discovered that Dickinson was close enough to Lead that his engineers could easily get an acceptable signal from KHSD whenever CBS and ABC programming aired.

Channel 2 then dropped all NBC programming and severed its remaining ties with KOTA-TV; afterward, KDIX-TV and the Reiten stations — KXMC-TV, KXMB-TV, and KXMD-TV — were jointly branded as the "4X Network.

"[2] In 1983, Deck sold KDIX-TV to Big Horn Communications, which owned KOUS-TV (now KHMT) in Billings, and the calls were changed to KNDX.

In 2008, KXNet.com became the first web site in North Dakota to deliver a live news broadcast over the Internet when they streamed a 1-hour special coverage of the 2008 Presidential Caucuses from Bismarck.

Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced its $44 million purchase of the Reiten Television stations, including KXMA-TV, on September 17, 2015.

On November 30, 2013, actor Will Ferrell, as a promotion for his film Anchorman 2, co-anchored the KX network's evening news as his character Ron Burgundy.

[6] The station's signal is multiplexed: Starting in 2016, KXMA moved CBS programming to its second digital subchannel, with The CW Plus on its primary channel.