KSWB-TV

The station first signed on the air on October 1, 1984 as KTTY. The station originally operated from studios located on Frontage Road in Chula Vista. Originally locally owned by San Diego Television, it operated as an independent station; it maintained a general entertainment format featuring a mix of dramas, classic movies, cartoons and religious programming that the other stations in the market declined to air. KTTY also aired a significant amount of paid programming. The station suffered from low ratings throughout its run as an independent station, struggling to compete with established independents XETV-TV (channel 6) and KUSI-TV (channel 51). On January 11, 1995, KTTY became the San Diego charter affiliate of The WB, an upstart broadcast network that was majority owned by the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner.[3]

The station fell into bankruptcy, and Tribune Broadcasting, whose corporate parent—the Tribune Company—owned the remaining stake in The WB that Time Warner did not maintain, purchased the station at a bankruptcy auction in 1995,[4] and took control of it in 1996; on August 16 of that year, the company changed the station's call letters to KSWB-TV (for "San Diego's WB," which served as the station's slogan for most of its tenure with The WB).[5] After Tribune took ownership of channel 69, the station added many off-network sitcoms to its schedule, with talk and court shows being mixed in as well throughout the remainder of the 1990s.

KSWB's CW-era logo, used from September 18, 2006 to July 31, 2008.

On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down the broadcast networks that they had respectively owned, The WB and UPN. In their place, the companies would combine The WB and UPN's respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW (a name that represents the first initials of each of the network's corporate parents), which would also include newer series developed for the network.[6][7] With the announcement, The CW signed a ten-year affiliation agreement with Tribune Broadcasting for 16 of the group's 19 WB affiliates, with KSWB-TV named as the network's San Diego affiliate.[7][8]

The CW officially launched on September 18, 2006 (Entravision-owned UPN affiliate XHUPN-TV in nearby Tecate, Baja California, Mexico joined MyNetworkTV, another startup network run by Fox Entertainment Group that launched two weeks prior to The CW's debut, and changed its callsign to XHDTV-TV). Unlike many other former WB affiliates that also had call letters relating to its former affiliation, KSWB chose to retain the callsign that references the now-defunct network. The station also served as the local broadcaster of games from the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers until it switched to Fox, which were produced by Los Angeles sister station KTLA (KTLA itself would lose the broadcast rights to the Clippers to regional sports networks Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket in 2009).

During a seminar by Sam Zell on March 25, 2008, it was revealed that Tribune Broadcasting (which Zell acquired as part of his 2007 takeover of the Tribune Company, which would result in the start of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings that lasted four years until 2012 due to debt from Zell's leveraged buyout) had signed an affiliation agreement with Fox to make KSWB the network's new San Diego affiliate.[9] This caught station management at Tijuana-licensed XETV-TV off guard as there was no knowledge about the impending loss of its Fox affiliation until the announcement was made public (that station's status as a Fox affiliate was contested unsuccessfully in a previous attempt by KUSI-TV to strip the affiliation from XETV in a 1995 U.S. Court of Appeals filing).[10] Fox later cited concerns with having its programming airing on a Mexican-licensed station (which happened six years earlier when XETV's sister stations in Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo were stripped of their affiliations), even though XETV had broadcast its programming almost entirely in English for over half a century and was Fox's charter affiliate in the market since the network's October 1986 inception.[11]

At first, there was speculation that CW network programming in the San Diego market would be brought in out-of-market from KSWB's Los Angeles sister station KTLA, which was carried on cable locally at the time on Cox Communications channel 14.[12] Two other scenarios were also being entertained, including speculation that KUSI-TV would pick up the CW affiliation or that KSWB would re-activate its second digital subchannel (which had been silent since The Tube Music Network abruptly ceased operations in October 2007) and move the network's programming there. On July 2, 2008, Bay City Television/Grupo Televisa signed an affiliation agreement to bring The CW's programming over to XETV. With the Fox affiliation agreement, KSWB-TV's ten-year contract with The CW was rendered void, ending the station's two-year association with the network as it joined Fox on August 1, 2008, directly swapping affiliations with XETV-TV as the CW affiliation for the market was moved over to that station.[13] In turn, XETV replaced KSWB as the default CW affiliate for DirecTV subscribers in the few areas of the western United States where a CW-affiliated station is not receivable over-the-air or through cable television.

On May 8, 2017, Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it would acquire Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in debt held by Tribune. Had the deal received regulatory approval, the proposed sale would have put KSWB-TV (and sister stations KTLA in Los Angeles and KTXL-TV in Sacramento) under common ownership with Sinclair's two existing California-based duopolies: CBS affiliate KBAK-TV and Fox affiliate KBFX-CD in Bakersfield, and Fox affiliate KMPH-TV and CW affiliate KFRE-TV in Fresno, California, plus pending acquisitions (from a separate deal) KRCR-TV and KAEF-TV in Redding and Eureka, respectively.[14][15][16][17][18][19]

On December 15, 2017, it was speculated that Sinclair would resell KSWB-TV to Fox Television Stations upon approval of the Tribune deal.[20] On April 24, 2018, Sinclair announced that KSWB-TV would be one of 23 stations sold to obtain approval for the merger, though it was one of seven stations for which a buyer was not disclosed.[21] On May 9, 2018, it was officially announced that Fox Television Stations would buy KSWB-TV, as part of a $910-million deal that also involved six other Tribune-owned stations (Fox affiliates KTXL, KCPQ/Seattle, KDVR/Denver, WJW/Cleveland and KSTU/Salt Lake City, and CW affiliate WSFL-TV/Miami). If the sale is approved, it would make KSWB-TV (and sister station KTXL) a Fox owned-and-operated station and sister to KTVU in Oakland/San Francisco and KTTV in Los Angeles.[22] It would also be the third O&O station in San Diego (behind NBC O&O KNSD and Telemundo O&O KUAN-LD).

Three weeks after the FCC's July 18 vote to have the deal reviewed by an administrative law judge amid "serious concerns" about Sinclair's forthrightness in its applications to sell certain conflict properties, on August 9, 2018, Tribune announced it would terminate the Sinclair deal, intending to seek other M&A opportunities. Tribune also filed a breach of contract lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court, alleging that Sinclair engaged in protracted negotiations with the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division over regulatory issues, refused to sell stations in markets where it already had properties, and proposed divestitures to parties with ties to Sinclair executive chair David D. Smith that were rejected or highly subject to rejection to maintain control over stations it was required to sell. The termination of the Sinclair sale agreement places uncertainty for the future of Fox's purchases of KSWB and the other six Tribune stations included in that deal, which were predicated on the closure of the Sinclair–Tribune merger.[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]

On December 3, 2018, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Media Group announced it would acquire the assets of Tribune Media for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. In the case of KSWB, reports preceding the purchase announcement stated that, as it did during the group's failed purchase by Sinclair, Fox Television Stations would seek to acquire certain Fox-affiliated stations owned by Tribune from the eventual buyer of that group.[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] The sale was approved by the FCC on September 16 and was completed on September 19, 2019.

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Upon receiving the Fox affiliation, KSWB surpassed Syracuse, New York affiliate WSYT (which broadcast on UHF channel 68) as the highest channel allocation of any Fox station in the country (and was tied with Atlanta owned-and-operated station WUPA for the highest channel number of any CW affiliate during KSWB's two-year tenure with that network). Since the digital transition, it retains the highest PSIP channel number out of Fox's stations.

On October 1, 2010, the station began to carry This TV on its second digital subchannel, the first time since a short-lived affiliation with The Tube Music Network prior to that service ending operations in October 2007 that KSWB had carried a digital subchannel. The station then added the Tribune-owned classic television service Antenna TV to a new 69.3 subchannel upon that network's January 1, 2011 debut. It moved to KSWB-DT2 on November 1, 2019 upon the launch of Court TV under a deal with Tribune on all their stations made before the Nexstar merger went into effect, with This TV being removed upon that date.

KSWB shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 69, on February 17, 2009, the original target date in which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back five months to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 19.[47][48] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 69, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.

• Aloha Taylor (AMS Seal of Approval; member, NWA) – chief meteorologist

• Ali Fedotowsky - features/lifestyle reporter (later host of NBC's 1st Look, now correspondent for E! News)
• Kendis Gibson - anchor (now with NBC News and MSNBC)
• Arthel Neville - anchor (now with Fox News Channel)
• Anne State - anchor (later at WITI in Milwaukee, now at San Diego's rival KGTV)