The long road to construction
In 1986, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added a channel 2 assignment to Fredericksburg, located 67 mi from Austin and 63 mi from San Antonio; the allotment was possible without interfering with channel 2 stations in Nuevo Laredo to the south, Midland to the west, Denton to the north, and Houston to the east.[2] With Fredericksburg located almost halfway between two media markets, the availability of a VHF station that could potentially serve both attracted attention from prospective owners. In June 1987, the FCC designated twelve applicants for comparative hearing.[3] Some of the applicants, notably the Telemundo network, dropped out in the months following the hearing designation order. Administrative law judge Edward Luton made his initial decision on who should be granted the channel out of six contenders in June 1989; he selected Stonewall Television, owned by Marquis Whittington and Robert Simmons. The FCC's review board overturned this decision in 1993 and gave the nod to Fredericksburg Channel 2, a consortium headed by former San Antonio Spurs owner Red McCombs and Bob Roth, a former manager and son of the owner of KONO-TV (channel 12) in San Antonio in the 1950s and 1960s.[4]
As appeals continued on the 1993 decision, tragedy struck. On October 20, 1995, Roth and two executives from the Hearst Corporation took a trip to scout the area and view the proposed transmitter site. The car they were traveling in was involved in a head-on collision south of Stonewall; Roth died at the age of 73. No one was wearing seat belts at the time of the accident.[5]
In 1996, Fredericksburg Channel 2 merged with one of its five competing applicants: Global Information Technologies of Austin, a company owned by Carmen and Saleem Tawil. The Tawils had previously built and sold a low-power independent TV station in Austin, K13VC.[6]
In August 1997, the FCC approved the combined application of Fredericksburg Channel 2 and Global and dismissed the other applicants, one of which, Frontier Broadcasting, challenged the dismissal in federal appeals court; Frontier had its application dismissed over transmitter site issues in 1989. With a construction permit in hand, the partnership, taking the name of Corridor Television, began building channel 2 in 1998.[7] The call letters KBEJ, a sequential assignment, were given to the construction permit in May 1998.[8][9]
As a UPN affiliate
As early as 1997, it appeared most likely that Corridor Television would seek an affiliation with UPN. By 2000, the network had already experienced problems keeping an affiliate in both San Antonio and Austin. When it launched in 1995, the network was affiliated with KRRT (channel 35) in San Antonio, while Austin was served by the Hill Country Paramount Network, a chain of low-power TV stations. Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of KRRT, switched all of its UPN affiliates to The WB in a group deal announced in 1997,[10] leaving UPN without a full-time affiliate in San Antonio. Since then, UPN had been relegated to late-night clearances on KMOL-TV, the NBC affiliate that was co-owned with UPN itself by United Television.[11] In 1998, UPN had dropped the Hill Country Paramount Network for K13VC on six days' notice because K13VC, unlike the previous affiliate, had cable carriage.[12]
As a CW affiliate
On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down The WB and UPN and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new fifth network, The CW. On March 28, Corridor Television signed an agreement to make KBEJ San Antonio's CW affiliate.[21] Three weeks later, on April 18, The CW announced it had affiliated with Austin's WB affiliate, KNVA.[22] On April 7, 2006, KBEJ changed to KCWX, reflecting its new affiliation.[23]
With The CW boasting affiliates for both San Antonio and Austin, KCWX became a San Antonio-market station exclusively.[24]
Switch to MyNetworkTV
Sinclair Broadcast Group disclosed in its 2009 annual report for that year, released in March 2010, that it had signed the month before to move the CW affiliation to KMYS—the former KRRT—on September 1, 2010.[27] The affiliation switch was eventually moved up two days to August 30; on that date, the MyNetworkTV affiliation moved to KCWX.[28] With the then-pending loss of its CW affiliation, Belo terminated its LMA with Corridor Television on April 24, 2010, forcing Corridor to operate KCWX on its own from Austin.[29]
On January 22, 2025, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a $369,190 fine against KCWX for failing to properly transmit National Periodic Tests of the Emergency Alert System in 2018, 2019 and 2021. According to the report, the FCC accused the station of numerous violations of EAS regulations, including rebroadcasting alert tones and audio relays from previous years, simulating test messages instead of the authorized test message, and falsely claiming to have properly received the tests when it had not.[30]
