WKEF (channel 22) is a television station in Dayton, Ohio, United States, affiliated with ABC, Fox, and MyNetworkTV.

The two stations share studios on Corporate Place in Miamisburg; WKEF's transmitter is located off South Gettysburg Avenue in southwest Dayton.

[1][7] In March 1961, the owners of Skyland Broadcasting Corporation sold the construction permit for dark WONE-TV, as well as on-the-air then-sister stations WONE (AM) and WIFE (FM) (now WTUE), to Brush-Moore Newspapers.

In addition, viewers could watch the full ABC schedule on WKRC-TV in Cincinnati and WTVN-TV (now WSYX) in Columbus, both of which decently covered Dayton.

Under these circumstances, ABC initially balked at giving even a secondary affiliation to WKEF, forcing the station to make a go of it as an independent until late 1965.

For many years, WKEF produced the daily children's program Clubhouse 22 hosted by Malcolm MacLeod in the early 1970s with Joe Smith taking over in the mid-1970s.

For a time, the theme song of the program was to the tune of "High Hopes" and included the lyrics "Joe and Duff on Clubhouse 22!"

WKRC-TV and WTVN-TV were both preempting decent amounts of the network's daytime programming, late night shows, and some of the Saturday morning cartoons.

In late 1979, ABC began talks with WDTN, which provided at least grade B coverage from northern Kentucky all the way to Columbus.

The two sides quickly reached a deal, which called for ABC to move its Dayton affiliation to WDTN when WKEF's contract ran out at the end of the year.

Since WKEF already had to compete in its own market with WDTN and CBS affiliate WHIO-TV—two of their networks' strongest performers—it found the going rather difficult.

In 1984, the Springfield Television group (WKEF, WWLP, and KSTU in Salt Lake City) was sold to Adams Communications.

Even with NBC's powerhouse prime time lineup in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the third station in what was basically a two-station market.

The incident landed Sinclair at the center of a mild controversy fueling the debate over whether the context of such material should be considered in determining broadcast indecency violations.

Around November 11, 2010, Sinclair announced that when carriage agreements expired at the end of the year, it planned to pull all of its owned and/or operated TV stations in the United States, including WKEF and WRGT-TV, from Time Warner Cable, in a dispute over "retransmission fees".

On December 31, Time Warner reached an agreement with an out-of-market station, presumably Cincinnati's WCPO-TV, to provide ABC network programming at least through the end of February.

Sinclair expected to spend $5 million on renovations to its new facility, making it fully digital and high definition.

With Cincinnati and Dayton less than a 40-mile (64 km) drive apart, it is not known if Sinclair is simply taking advantage of the FCC repealing the Main Studio Rule in 2019 or if there are plans to collapse the Cincinnati and Dayton markets into one large market; in the case of the latter, Sinclair would have a legal duopoly between WKEF and WKRC-TV while having operational control of WRGT-TV and WSTR-TV.

Mark Pierce was named news director, with anchor John Getter, sports from Billy McCool, and meteorologist Virginia Bigler.

Bigler was granted the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval based on her weather segments, becoming the second female meteorologist in the United States to receive this.

It ran these updates at selected times in the morning, afternoon, and evening using a still slide on-screen with a picture of the newscaster.

WKEF did not participate in the wider implementation of Sinclair's now-defunct, controversial News Central format for its newscasts but did air The Point, a one-minute conservative political commentary hosted by Mark E. Hyman, that was also controversial and a requirement of all Sinclair-owned stations with newscasts until the series was discontinued in December 2006.

The station made national headlines on May 28, 2019, when a video surfaced of the station's news department cutting into the previous night's airing of The Bachelorette for a breaking news story on a tornado warning in the area, and meteorologist Jamie Simpson firing back at social media complaints about the preemption by stating that saving people's lives was more important than an episode of The Bachelorette.

As tornadoes did indeed hit the Dayton area later that night, The Weather Channel cited Simpson's rant as "possibly saving lives".

[39] In early November 2024, the weeknight 6:30 and 10 p.m. newscasts on WRGT-TV, as well as the weeknight 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts on WKEF, were changed to an anchorless format, similar to the so-called "Scrippscast" format used by some E. W. Scripps Company television stations; Aaro no longer appears on-air, instead providing the voiceover for some news stories.

[citation needed] The station's signal is multiplexed: WKEF aired The Tube on DT2 and Time Warner Cable digital channel 723.

[53] The "Fox 45" branding remained on 22.2, with the logo similar to that previously used by WRGT-TV, except that callsign was replaced by "WKEF(TV) 22.2".

[54][55] As part of the SAFER Act,[56] WKEF 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.

Initially, this new low-power analog broadcast operated under Cincinnati sister station WSTR-TV's Dayton translator license, W66AQ (formerly on channel 66).

This request was made as part of WKEF's agreement with T-Mobile to eliminate potential interference with that company's wireless operations adjacent to channel 51.