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.[14][15] 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.[5] 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.[16][17]
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.[18][19]
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).[21][22]
In August 1998, LeSEA Broadcasting and KWHB were fined up to $12,000 by the Federal Communications Commission for exceeded Children's Television Act advertising limits (which restrict programming time allocated to commercials to 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10½ minutes per hour on weekends) during children's programs that aired on the station a total of 47 times between July 13, 1996, and December 1, 1997. In a notice of apparent liability for forfeiture, the FCC noted that the station noted on its last renewal application that it had exceeded the guidelines by anywhere between 15 and 95 seconds during the cited incidents. The station cited in an application for its prior license renewal that the violations resulted from "inadvertence and/or human error stemming from the failure of KWHB's personnel to detect, over the course of more than a year, a computer error responsible for the commercial overages," and issue that the Commission has "repeatedly rejected" as a reasoning for advertising time violations in the past.[29] In 2001, KWHB moved to new studio facilities located on South Memorial Drive (north of East 91st Street) in southeastern Tulsa.
On May 4, 1999, transmission lines at KWHB's Coweta transmitter facility were knocked out due to intense lightning related to severe thunderstorms associated with a storm system that produced 66 tornadoes across the central third of Oklahoma on May 3. KWHB's signal was taken offline on May 8, due to a steady decrease in power to the transmission lines, as station engineers were preparing to remove and replace the lines and their internal electrical conductors. On that date, TCI regained access to the station at its northeastern Oklahoma headends after repairs to the direct fiber optic studio feed were completed. KWHB's over-the-air signal returned to the air on May 19.[30]
By 2012, KWHB had reduced its secular programming slightly (consisting of sitcoms, drama series and lifestyle programs) to 3 to 7 p.m. each weekday, with a scattering of secular shows airing for a few hours each Saturday and for up to an hour on Sundays, along with a three-hour-long block of children's programs compliant with FCC educational programming guidelines on Saturday mornings. In September 2017, following similar scheduling changes at LeSEA's other stations, KWHB was repositioned as a family-oriented entertainment station. Secular shows were now more than half the schedule. Its schedule was revamped to consist mostly of off-network reruns of sitcoms and drama series made from the 1950s to present during the afternoon and evening hours, a late-night block of westerns, and first-run syndicated court and lifestyle shows on weekday early afternoons and weekend afternoons; religious programming was relegated to weekday mornings between 7:30 a.m. and noon, but continue to make up the majority of its Sunday lineup.
