KWHB (channel 47) is a religious television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, owned by the Christian Television Network (CTN). The station's studios are located on Yellowood Avenue in Broken Arrow, and it transmits from atop the CityPlex Towers (located south of the Oral Roberts University campus).
History Early history The non-commercial UHF channel 47 allocation was contested between two groups that vied to hold the construction permit to build a new station on the frequency. The first prospective permittee was the David Livingstone Missionary Foundation, a nonprofit religious corporation headed by Billy James Hargis, a Tulsa-born evangelist, who founded American Christian College; the foundation filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on April 17, 1978. The second applicant, Alden Communications Corporation, filed its own application on September 5. The FCC granted the license to the Livingstone Missionary Foundation on December 12, 1979. After vying for the construction permit for a year-and-a-half, Alden and the Livingstone Foundation proposed consolidating their respective permit applications. Following a March 1980 hearing in which the FCC determined issues regarding the respective licensing proposals, the Hargis group (which by that time, had transferred the permit application to another of his organizations, Church of Christian Crusade, Inc. [CCC]) was granted the permit that winter, despite issues that Alden had raised against CCC in part over possible rule violations in its attempts to discourage public file inspections. Hargis planned to sign on the station by Christmas of 1981. CCC applied for its station to use KBJH-TV as its callsign, applying the calls that the Livingstone Foundation used on its Christian radio station on 98.5 FM, KBJH (now KVOO-FM). That request was protested by the Scripps-Howard Broadcasting, which contested that the assignment would create confusion with Scripps-owned NBC affiliate KJRH-TV (channel 2); however, the FCC Broadcast Bureau stated that calls were sufficiently different to prevent confusion in part because KJRH was a VHF station, and granted CCC use of the callsign in January 1982.
In October 1983, Church of the Christian Crusade sold an 85% interest in the permit to Oral Roberts University (ORU) for 85% of FCC-approved expenditures totaling $255,000; the FCC granted approval of the transaction on January 12, 1984. However, ORU would later back out of the transaction that spring, at which time CCC was granted its next set of calls for the channel 47 permit, KDLF-TV (after the organization's radio station in Port Neches, Texas, now KBPO). The permit changed hands once again in July 1984, when CCC sold the permit to Television Communications Inc. (owned by local minister Jack Rehburg) for $410,000; Rehburg subsequently planned to call its proposed station KTCT (for "Tulsa Christian Television", which had served as the branding for KGCT-TV [channel 41, later KTFO and now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV] when Rehburg maintained a time-leasing agreement with that station from 1984 to 1985).
After the Rehburg group backed out of the sale, the permit would finally find a buyer who would sign on the station in the fall of 1984, when the permit was sold to San Francisco–based Coit Drapery and Cleaners, Inc. Channel 47, as KTCT, first signed on the air on June 3, 1985. Operating as a religious independent station, it originally maintained studio facilities located at East 58th Street and South Garnett Road in southeastern Tulsa ( east of the then-studio facility of KGCT). Its initial schedule consisted of Christian programming from the PTL Satellite Network, including shows such as The PTL Club, Heritage Village USA and 100 Huntley Street, as well as programs from televangelists such as Kenneth Copeland, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and Richard Roberts. KTCT suffered from financial problems early on, and reduced its programming schedule to approximately six hours a day by that winter. Coit Drapery and Cleaners opted to put KTCT up for sale there, and wanted to sell the station to a Christian religious broadcast ministry.
LeSEA ownership In April 1986, South Bend, Indiana–based LeSEA Evangelistic Ministries (eventually renamed Family Broadcasting Corporation in June 2018) – an organization headed by Lester Sumrall and sons Frank, Phillip and Peter Sumrall – purchased the station from Coit for $3.4 million. After the acquisition was finalized in the fall of 1986, LeSEA changed the station's call letters to KWHB (standing for "World Harvest Broadcasting"). The station initially retained some PTL programming and added other religious programs in the ministry's inventory and original programs (such as The 700 Club, LeSEA Alive, Lester Sumrall Teaches and televangelism programs from pastors such as Dwight Thompson, Ernest Angley and Jack Van Impe). By 1987, KWHB also added secular family-oriented entertainment programming on weekday afternoons between 2 and 7 p.m. and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays; at the time, it began selling airtime during its secular programming to local and national advertisers to run commercials during program breaks.
After KGCT began a two-year operational cessation in February 1989, in order to allow original owner Green Country Associates to weigh sale offers for the station, KWHB acquired a selection of cartoon shorts and animated series that channel 41 previously carried on its schedule. As time went on, KWHB carried a broad mix of various syndicated programs including classic and some recent sitcoms (such as The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Mister Ed, The Little Rascals, Dennis The Menace (both the live-action sitcom and the animated series), The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and The Cosby Show), westerns (such as Bonanza), and animated series (such as The Jetsons, Yogi's Gang and DuckTales); it also carried a mixture of movies and sporting events on weekends. Televangelist and church service programming by this time typically aired during the prime time and overnight hours and throughout most of its Sunday lineup. Although the station ran a decent amount of general entertainment programming, the Tulsa edition of TV Guide never included KWHB in its listings for undisclosed reasons, an unusual situation given that the magazine had provided listings for full-time Christian television stations in its other regional editions.
During the 1990s, KWHB also began producing several local programs such as the public affairs program 47 Family Magazine, and ministerial programs like Life on the Vine, Full Gospel House of Prayer and Through the Bible with Les Feldick (the latter of which was syndicated to other television stations throughout Oklahoma and surrounding states); one such show, the Contemporary Christian music video program EQ Video, was syndicated to all eleven television stations that LeSEA owned at that time. On July 11, 1993, Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) – which, as a byproduct of a corporate breakup tied to AT&T's 1999 purchase of TCI, would sell its Tulsa cable franchise to Cox Communications in February 2000 – began offering KWHB on channel 7, which expanded the station's distribution to cable television subscribers in the Tulsa area; KWHB was one of three Tulsa-area stations (along with KTFO and Claremore-based educational independent KRSC-TV [channel 35, now KRSU-TV]) to be given clearance on TCI as a result of rules included in the Cable Television Protection and Competition Act that allowed full-power television stations to elect for mandatory carriage on cable providers.
KWHB became a part-time network affiliate on January 11, 1995, when it initiated a rather informal charter affiliation with The WB at that network's launch. Channel 47 initially carried the network's family-oriented prime time shows (such as 7th Heaven, The Parent 'Hood, Smart Guy and Sister, Sister) and, beginning with its debut that September, animated series from the network's children's program block, Kids' WB, on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. However, because of LeSEA Broadcasting's ministerial structure, the strict content guidelines that the group maintained for secular programs carried on its stations resulted in KWHB refusing to clear prime time network shows that contained strong profanity, violent or sexual content (such as Unhappily Ever After, Savannah, Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) on the belief that they would offend the sensibilities of channel 47's mostly Christian and Evangelical viewership; these programs were substituted with either ministry and televangelist programs or secular syndicated programs already in LeSEA's inventory or sports. Originally, this was not a significant issue as the preempted programs could be seen in the market via the superstation feed of Chicago WB affiliate WGN-TV (now standalone cable channel NewsNation) on most of the area's cable and satellite providers.
Local cable provider TCI dropped WGN from its lineup on December 31, 1996, when WGN, The Nashville Network and BET were removed to make room for five channels not previously carried on TCI's Tulsa system (Cartoon Network, TLC, Animal Planet, ESPN2 and HGTV). While this cut off access to the KWHB-preempted WB programs carried on the superstation feed to TCI's approximately 170,000 subscribers in the Tulsa area, it remained available locally on Heartland Cable Television, DirecTV, Dish Network and PrimeStar. WGN was particularly vulnerable to removal as it had lost access to much of the Chicago Bulls' 1996–97 game schedule due to a dispute between its Tulsa-based distributor, United Video Satellite Group (co-founded by Ed Taylor and Roy Bliss, founders of local TCI predecessor Tulsa Cable Television), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) over WGN's carriage of the team's telecasts outside of the Chicago market (TCI did not include its Oklahoma systems among those that retained the WGN national feed per an agreement reached with United Video that December, which kept the channel available on TCI in five Midwestern states). The WB began to regret affiliating with a conservative religious station because of LeSEA's preemption policies, and began making plans to move its programming elsewhere. Muskogee-based KWBT (channel 19, now CW affiliate KQCW-DT) took over as the market's WB affiliate when it bowed on September 12, 1999, carrying The WB's entire prime time schedule (including the few shows that KWHB carried beforehand) as well as the Kids' WB lineup. (For the reasons concerning The WB's prior partnership with KWHB, in preparation for the network's fall 1999 premiere week, KWBT included some returning WB prime time shows that station had declined to carry, as part of an evening catch-up block that aired during the week of September 12.)