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KTUL, virtual channel 8 (VHF digital channel 10), is an ABC-affiliated television station located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The station is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group. KTUL maintains studio facilities located at Lookout Mountain (near South 29th West Avenue) in southwestern Tulsa, and its transmitter is located between South 305th Street East and the Muskogee Turnpike in southeastern Tulsa County (near Coweta). On cable, the station is available on Cox Communications and AT&T U-verse channel 8. There is a high definition feed available on Cox Communications digital channel 708 and AT&T U-verse channel 1008. ==History== The station first signed on the air on September 18, 1954 as KTVX. It was founded by the Tulsa Broadcasting Company, which was majority owned by Oklahoma grocery magnate and broadcast pioneer John Toole Griffin, who also owned radio station KTUL (1430 AM, now KTBZ). The first program to be broadcast on channel 8 was a college football game in which the University of Oklahoma defeated the University of California. The station was originally licensed to Muskogee, roughly due south of Tulsa; this was because the third VHF frequency originally allocated to the Tulsa market, channel 11, had been reserved for use by a non-commercial educational license (the VHF channel 11 frequency is now occupied by PBS member station KOED, part of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority state network). Griffin therefore decided to seek the channel 8 allocation in Muskogee, the nearest city in the Tulsa market with an assigned VHF channel allocation; the UHF band was not considered viable at the time as most television sets on the retail market then were not equipped with UHF tuners, this would not change until after the Federal Communications Commission passed the All-Channel Receiver Act in 1961. The KTVX call letters were assigned to the station after Griffin discovered that the U.S. Treasury Department's Customs Bureau had assigned them as the signal code to a retired ocean vessel, the William S. Clark, until January 1947. The station's original studio facilities were based inside a converted grocery store on Eastside Boulevard in Muskogee, with its transmitter located atop Concharty Mountain in the Wagoner County town of Stonebluff. KTVX took the ABC affiliation from KCEB (channel 23, channel now occupied by KOKI-TV), a UHF station that signed on the previous year. The first two personalities at KTVX were news anchor Jack Morris and meteorologist Don Woods, with sports director Hal O'Halloran joining the station later on. The current studio facility on Lookout Mountain had originally been built for KCEB in 1954; the second television station in Tulsa (after KOTV, channel 6), KCEB briefly carried NBC programming, before switching its affiliation to ABC earlier in 1954. KTVX acquired the ABC affiliation from KCEB, leaving that station as an affiliate of the DuMont Television Network, a non-viable fourth network that itself would soon fold in August 1956. In 1955, KCEB sold its Lookout Mountain studios to Griffin; former owner James C. Leake moved KTVX's operations to Tulsa from Muskogee soon after KCEB ceased operations. KTUL radio had moved into the facility in April of that year, while KTVX moved into the building eight months later in November. The Lookout Mountain facility was used as an auxiliary studio until 1957, when the station received permission from the FCC to move all operations, as well as the station's city of license, to Tulsa (although FCC regulations had been changed a few years earlier so that the station could have remained licensed to Muskogee, while operating solely in Tulsa). In 1955, John Chick joined the station and served as host of two popular afternoon children's shows – ''Cartoon Zoo'' and ''Mr. Zing and Tuffy'' – as well as hosting ''The John Chick Show'', a live morning music program that featured local country music talent and square dancing. The program, which aired weekday mornings at 7:00 a.m., proved to be a more popular alternative to network morning shows ''Today'' on KVOO and the ''CBS Morning News'' on KOTV. ''The John Chick Show'' pre-empted ''AM America'', when the program debuted on ABC in 1975; when ABC president Elton Rule and other executives with the network demanded to know why KTUL did not give clearance to the fast-growing ''Good Morning America'' in the late 1970s, network management backed off after owner James C. "Jimmy" Leake informed Rule about ''The John Chick Shows''s high local ratings. KTUL would not air ''GMA'' until 1979, after John Chick departed the station. On September 12, 1957, the day the move to Tulsa took effect, the station changed its call letters to KTUL-TV to match its radio sister (the KTVX call sign is currently used by another ABC-affiliated television station in Salt Lake City, Utah). Griffin sold off KTUL radio in 1961. In 1965, the station built a new transmitter tower in Coweta, which became the second-tallest broadcast tower in the United States at that time and would enable the station to carry ABC programming in color, which was activated on July 24 of that year. Another popular KTUL personality was Betty Boyd, whom KTUL lured away from competitor KOTV in 1965 to host ''The Betty Boyd Show'', a local daytime program that featured a mix of interviews with Tulsa area newsmakers, community affairs and women's topics; the program helped KTUL reach first place among female viewers. ABC had long placed third in the national network ratings; it was not until the late 1970s, that ABC would improve its viewership to become America's most-watched broadcast network. KTUL's local programming had made it one of the network's strongest stations and the Tulsa market's leading television station for the next 35 years. In 1968, Griffin sold KTUL-TV and Little Rock, Arkansas sister station KATV to his brother-in-law, Jimmy Leake; Griffin retained control of KWTV in Oklahoma City (Griffin's company, which eventually became Griffin Communications, would re-enter the Tulsa market when it purchased KOTV in October 2000〔(Belo to Sell Tulsa, Okla., TV Station to Oklahoma City Communications Firm ), Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News (via HighBeam Research), October 18, 2000.〕). KTUL continued its popular children's programming in the 1970s with ''Uncle Zeb's Cartoon Camp'' (which replaced ''Mr. Zing and Tuffy'' in 1970), hosted by Carl Bartholemew as the gruff Uncle Zeb. Following Uncle Zeb were sitcoms that appealed to children, such as ''The Flintstones'', ''The Lucy Show'', ''Gilligan's Island'', ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' and ''Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.''. Griffin and Leake had shared ownership of the stations for many years. Leake kept KTUL and KATV until selling them to Allbritton Communications in 1982. In 1987, KTUL's broadcast tower collapsed due to heavy freezing rain accumulations from an ice storm; a new tower located near Coweta was completed the following year. In 1999, KTUL built new broadcast facilities on Lookout Mountain to accommodate station growth. In 1996, then-meteorologist Frank Mitchell made a surprise wedding proposal to his co-host, Teri Bowers, during a live broadcast of the station's morning newscast ''Good Morning Oklahoma''; the proposal made national news and was featured on programs such as ''American Journal'', ''Geraldo'' and ''Maury''. On May 1, 2013, reports surfaced that Allbritton was planning to sell its television stations in order to focus on running its political news website Politico. On July 29, the company announced that it would sell its entire television group, including KTUL, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group for $985 million. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「KTUL」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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