KTUL (channel 8), branded as Tulsa's News Pulse, is a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with ABC and Fox. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside KMYT-TV (channel 41)—an independent station with MyNetworkTV—and is co-managed with KOKI-TV (channel 23). The three stations share studios on East 27th Street and South Memorial Drive (near W. G. Skelly Park) in the Audubon neighborhood of southeast Tulsa; KTUL's primary transmitter is located on South 321st Avenue East, adjacent to the Muskogee Turnpike, near Coweta in western Wagoner County.
Channel 8 was originally allocated to Muskogee, Oklahoma, where several groups sought the permit, including Muskogee-based and out-of-town interests. The permit was won by J. T. Griffin and Marjory Griffin Leake, who owned radio station KTUL in Tulsa, and went on the air as KTVX on September 18, 1954. It affiliated with ABC, giving the Tulsa market primary affiliates of each of the Big Three networks. Despite several complaints from stations in Tulsa, the Federal Communications Commission granted KTVX permission to move to Tulsa in 1957, whereupon it became KTUL-TV. The station began broadcasting from Coweta in 1964; it continued to produce several notable non-news local programs into the 1970s.
KTUL was acquired in 1983 by Allbritton Communications. The station's newscasts generally fought for first and second place in the market, while the news department continued to expand its news offerings and resources. Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired the station in 2014 as part of its purchase of Allbritton. The news department was wound down in December 2023 in a cost-cutting measure, with the station's news programs originating from Sinclair-owned KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City. In 2026, Sinclair acquired the Fox affiliation and physical assets of KOKI-TV from Rincon Broadcasting Group.
Early history in Muskogee Hearing process and construction John Toole "J. T." Griffin—majority owner and president of wholesale food distributors Griffin Grocery Company and Denison Peanut Company and hardware manufacturer Western Hardware Corporation, all of which were headquartered in Muskogee—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 television antennas to receive the signal of Oklahoma City station WKY-TV. In June 1952, the Tulsa Broadcasting Company—a company run by John and his sister, Marjory Griffin Leake, and owner of Tulsa radio station KTUL (1430 AM) as well as radio interests in Oklahoma City and Fort Smith, Arkansas, applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build a television station on channel 8 in Muskogee. The application proposed studios in Muskogee and a transmitter on Concharty Mountain, northwest of the city. The choice to apply for Muskogee and not Tulsa's available channel 2 was attributed to the way the FCC was processing its backlog of applications, prioritizing cities without existing stations; Tulsa had KOTV on channel 6.
The Griffin-owned group saw competition crop up for the channel 8 permit over the next two years. The Oklahoma Press Publishing Company—a group majority owned by Tams Bixby Jr. and son Tams Bixby III, which published the Muskogee Phoenix and Times-Democrat and owned Muskogee radio station KBIX (1490 AM)—filed a separate application for the channel 8 license on October 9, 1952. The applicants derided the KTUL-led bid as an attempt to "slip in the back door" to Tulsa from the start, down to its proposal to use the call sign KTUL-TV. The Oklahoma Press application had the effect of pushing Muskogee—and channel 8—down the priority order because the channel was contested. The Tulsa Broadcasting Company took out a full-page advertisement questioning why, if these groups sought to provide local service, they did not apply for Muskogee's other channel, ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 66. Another application for channel 8 was received in November 1953 from Ashley L. Robison, who was selling a stake in a station he owned in Sacramento, California. The Tulsa Broadcasting bid was modified in early 1954 to specify a new general manager and studio site.
In February 1954, just as hearings were to begin for channel 8 in Muskogee and channel 2 in Tulsa, Oklahoma Press Publishing announced it was withdrawing from the case; the Daily Phoenix ran a front-page editorial declaring that the record now showed a city like Muskogee could not support a station on its own and that local businessmen were not supportive of the station they proposed, which they learned would be a "most hazardous venture". Robison followed suit weeks later; Tulsa Broadcasting settled with him and paid him $6,000 for the legal costs incurred in his application. This left Tulsa Broadcasting unopposed. FCC hearing examiner Millard French issued an initial decision in its favor, followed by a commission grant of the permit on April 8, 1954. Tulsa Broadcasting sought a call sign for the new station containing the letters TV and ended up with the call sign KTVX; Griffin discovered that the calls had been dormant since the S.S. William S. Clark turned in its signal code to the Customs Bureau of the Treasury Department upon the ocean vessel's January 1947 retirement.
Weeks after the FCC granted the permit, J. Elfred Beck, owner of fledgling UHF outlet KCEB, filed a protest with the FCC. Beck alleged that the Concharty Mountain transmitter site would provide better service to Tulsa than to Muskogee and that it would overlap with other Griffin-owned properties, particularly KWTV in Oklahoma City, as well as other Griffin holdings: KTUL, KFPW, and KOMA radio, as well as KATV in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. KOTV owner Wrather-Alvarez Inc. and Arthur R. Olson, permittee for an unbuilt UHF station in Tulsa, submitted their own petitions that made very similar allegations against Tulsa Broadcasting two weeks later. On July 9, the FCC denied the protest petitions were invalid, as the grant was handed down after a hearing. All three petitioners appealed the ruling to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which would deny their request to stay the construction of KTVX.
Early years KTVX began broadcasting on September 18, 1954, ramping up to a full 316,000 watts of power on November 30. It assumed the ABC affiliation shortly before launching, and it also aired programming from the DuMont Television Network. DuMont and NBC had previously been seen on KCEB when that station began in March, and NBC moved to channel 2 when KVOO-TV began on December 5. KCEB suspended operation on December 10. In April 1955, Tulsa Broadcasting bought KCEB's studios on Lookout Mountain in Tulsa for use as an auxiliary facility for KTVX; KTUL radio moved in the next month.
The earlier charges pertaining to KTVX's transmitter location resurfaced in April 1955, when KOTV owner General Television and KVOO-TV parent Central Plains Enterprises filed complaints requesting that the FCC force KTVX to cease representing itself as a Tulsa station or face a hearing. At the time, channel 8 identified as such or as a Muskogee–Tulsa station in on-air and print promotions. Station management replied that it saw nothing wrong in promoting itself as a Tulsa-market station and suggested that these and other issues raised in the complaint considered to be unfair trade practices should be appealed to the Federal Trade Commission instead. The FCC dismissed the complaint on September 2; Tulsa Broadcasting admitted to failing to comply with station identification rules but made assurances that it stopped such practices. The commission also admonished the station for exaggerating its coverage area in trade publications and reminded it that it must give "primary consideration" to Muskogee in its local programming. Two months later, KTVX began originating programs from the Tulsa studio.
Transfer to Tulsa On January 18, 1957, Tulsa Broadcasting filed a request to move KTVX's city of license from Muskogee to Tulsa. Tulsa Broadcasting claimed that Muskogee was not large enough to support a VHF station, that the move would put it at a better advantage with its Tulsa-based competitors, and that it would provide a third competitive station in Tulsa. After the FCC invited comments on the switch and other proposals, the owners of KOTV and KVOO-TV as well as Arthur Olson replied in opposition. Olson asked that KTVX remain licensed to Muskogee and relegated to a UHF channel if the channel 8 allocation were reassigned to Tulsa, claiming that Tulsa Broadcasting had "engaged in a pattern of inconsistent, misleading and incorrect representations to the [FCC]"; he stated that he would have applied for channel 8 instead of UHF channel 17 had it had been allocated to Tulsa from the start. KOTV and KVOO-TV stated that it had been operating as a de facto Tulsa station with limited equipment and personnel based in Muskogee. The commission denied these requests on August 2, 1957, moving channel 8 and KTVX to Tulsa. With the move, in September, the station changed its call letters to KTUL-TV to match its radio sister. The Griffin-Leake interests sold off KTUL radio in 1961. In 1963, Griffin and Leake bought out minority investors in KWTV, folding KTUL and KATV into the resulting company.
In 1963, the station applied to construct a new transmitter tower at a site east of Coweta (approximately northeast of the original transmitter site). Consideration of the application was delayed because a hearing was in progress over Griffin-Leake's qualifications to be a licensee in a case revolving around a planned transmitter relocation for KATV. After that hearing was dismissed, the FCC approved the relocation and new tower in February 1964. The new mast, billed as the second-tallest artificial structure in the world, was put into service on July 24, 1965. In 1967, the station began airing local programming in color.
One of channel 8's most popular program hosts in its early history was John Chick, who joined then-KTVX in 1955. From 1955 to 1963, Chick hosted the local afternoon children's program Cartoon Zoo, a showcase of cartoon shorts on which he originated the character Mr. Zing, donning a fake moustache—which Chick had chosen for the purpose of maintaining anonymity when he was not performing the character—and zookeeper's uniform. The program was the highest-rated children's program in the Tulsa market for most of its run. The program would later evolve into Mr. Zing and Tuffy after station director Wayne Johnson conceived the idea for the costumed tiger character Tuffy; he was also joined by another costumed animal character, Shaggy Dog (played by Tom Ledbetter and later Mike Denney).
Another popular KTUL personality joined channel 8 in 1965 when Betty Boyd, a well-known personality at rival KOTV, was lured away to host The Betty Boyd Show. The local daytime program, which featured a mix of interviews with Tulsa-area newsmakers, community affairs, and women's topics, later turned into a morning show, Good Morning Oklahoma, which ran until Boyd left channel 8 in 1980. It helped KTUL reach first place among female viewers at a time when ABC had remained lagged in third place among the three national networks in the Nielsen ratings.
Sole Leake ownership Griffin and Leake separated their broadcasting interests in 1969, unwinding a 29-year business connection: Griffin became the sole licensee of KWTV and retained the Muskogee-based Griffin Grocery Company, while Leake retained control of KTUL and KATV as well as a station in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, and other interests.