KWHB (channel 47) is a religious television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, owned and operated 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; soon, Livingstone Church of Christian Crusade, Inc. 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.