KFDA-TV: NewsChannel 10, Amarillo's CBS Station Since 1953
KFDA-TV, channel 10, is the CBS affiliate for Amarillo, Texas, branded as NewsChannel 10. Owned by Gray Media alongside Borger-licensed Telemundo affiliate KEYU, it broadcasts from studios on Broadway Drive in northern Amarillo, where its transmitter is also located, and reaches a vast territory across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, eastern New Mexico and southwestern Kansas through cable and a network of translators. KFDA-TV has been a CBS affiliate since the day it signed on, April 4, 1953, making it one of the network's longest-serving stations in Texas. It calls itself the most watched news in the Panhandle, and by its own accounting produces more local news than any competitor in the market. Few stations in West Texas carry a longer or more continuous history.
Amarillo and the Panhandle Market
Amarillo sits at the crossroads of the Texas Panhandle, and its television market is defined by distance: ranching and farming communities spread across three states depend on the city's stations. KFDA-TV was built for that geography from the start. Its tall transmitter — 466 metres above average terrain — and its chain of translators exist because a single signal, however powerful, cannot cleanly cover the Panhandle's rugged eastern edges and its far-flung towns. The station's coverage has at various times extended through satellite stations in Clovis, New Mexico, and western Oklahoma, as well as translators from Childress and Clarendon to Guymon, Tucumcari and Tulia. NewsChannel 10's identity is inseparable from that regional role: severe-weather coverage for tornado country, agricultural and energy news, and high school sports across an area larger than some eastern states.
Founding: The Amarillo Broadcasting Company
On July 3, 1952, the Amarillo Broadcasting Company filed with the Federal Communications Commission for a licence to operate on VHF channel 10. The consortium was led by radio owners Wendell Mayes, oil, gas and publishing figure C. C. Woodson, Texas State Network vice president Charles B. Jordan and network president Gene L. Cagle. The FCC granted the licence on October 8, 1952, and the group took the call letters KFDA-TV from its existing radio station, KFDA at 1440 AM, which had signed on in March 1939; the call letters themselves had originally been randomly assigned to the radio station. KFDA-TV first signed on the air on April 4, 1953, the second television station in Amarillo, two weeks after NBC affiliate KGNC-TV — now KAMR-TV — launched the market's first service on March 18. Channel 10 was a CBS affiliate from its debut, and it also carried ABC programmes at first, inheriting that relationship from KFDA radio's long affiliation with ABC Radio, dating to 1943 in the era of the Blue Network.
Texas State Network, Bass Broadcasting and the Satellites
In January 1954, the Texas State Network acquired a 75 percent controlling stake in KFDA-AM-TV for 525,000 dollars, with Jordan retaining his quarter interest. KFDA gave up its secondary ABC programming shortly before KVII-TV signed on as the market's ABC affiliate on December 21, 1957, remaining an exclusive CBS station thereafter. In January 1958, Jordan traded his television stake for full ownership of KFDA radio, though the two stations shared a call sign until 1966, when the radio station became KPUR under an FCC rule then prohibiting separately owned stations in a market from sharing call letters. To reach viewers its main signal could not, KFDA built a translator network and acquired satellites: in September 1963 its parent bought KICA-TV in Clovis, New Mexico, converting it to KFDW-TV, and in July 1966 it added KSWB in Elk City, Oklahoma, relaunched that September as KFDO-TV at Sayre to relay CBS into western Oklahoma. The owner renamed itself Bass Broadcasting Company in April 1965 under investor Perry R. Bass, and the Bass family took majority control in February 1966.
The Drewry Era
The Bass family left broadcasting in the mid-1970s to concentrate on oil and gas. KFDO-TV was sold to Marsh Media in October 1975 and became an ABC satellite, while KFDA-TV itself was sold in May 1976 to the Panhandle Telecasting Company — a partnership of KMID-TV owner Ray Herndon and R. H. Drewry, owner of KSWO-TV in Lawton, Oklahoma — for 2.8 million dollars, with FCC approval that August. Drewry acquired majority control in October 1983 for three million dollars, beginning a tenure that lasted more than three decades. Under Drewry Communications, KFDA anchored a local media group that eventually included the independent station known as NewsChannel 10 Too, Telemundo Amarillo and radio properties. Drewry agreed in July 2008 to sell its eleven television stations to Dallas-based London Broadcasting for 115 million dollars, and the FCC approved the deal — but London filed a notice of non-consummation in January 2009, walking away amid the market uncertainty of the Great Recession. KFDA therefore remained a Drewry station into the next decade.
Raycom, Gray and the Modern NewsChannel 10
On February 23, 2011, KFDA became the first station in the Amarillo market, and in West Texas as a whole, to carry syndicated programming and locally inserted advertising in high definition, upgrading its master control to handle HD content beyond network and in-house feeds; the same day, its newscasts went high definition, another market first. On August 10, 2015, Raycom Media announced it would buy Drewry's stations for 160 million dollars, completing the purchase on December 1 and making KFDA a sister to NBC affiliate KCBD in neighbouring Lubbock. Then, on June 25, 2018, Gray Television agreed to merge with Raycom in a 3.6-billion-dollar cash-and-stock transaction. The deal, approved on December 20, 2018, and completed on January 2, 2019, brought KFDA and KEYU under Gray ownership, while Gray sold Odessa–Midland's KWES-TV to comply with ownership rules and retained fellow CBS affiliate KOSA-TV. Under Gray, NewsChannel 10 operates as part of one of the largest station groups in the United States, while keeping its Amarillo studios, staff and identity.
The News Operation
News is the core of KFDA-TV's claim on the Panhandle. As of May 2025, the station broadcast thirty hours and thirty-five minutes of locally produced newscasts each week — five hours and thirty-five minutes each weekday, with shorter editions on Saturday and Sunday — the highest news output in the Texas Panhandle market. Its second subchannel adds more than twelve further hours on weekdays, including a morning extension and a simulcast of the 6 p.m. newscast, and the station simulcasts long-form severe-weather coverage on that channel whenever a tornado warning is issued for any county in its Texas, Oklahoma or New Mexico coverage area. The NewsChannel 10 name dates to 1995, succeeding NewsCenter 10, used from 1953 to 1979, and KFDA News. Its slogan, used since 2007, declares it the most watched news in the Panhandle. In May 2025 it added a Saturday Good News Edition at 10:35 p.m., a programme devoted to positive local stories within the same newsroom that covers the region's storms and emergencies.
Programming Beyond the News
KFDA-TV clears the entire CBS network schedule, with one local adjustment: the third hour of the Saturday CBS educational block airs before CBS Sunday Morning because the station carries Your Home Town View, an hour-long brokered local real-estate programme, on Saturday mornings; the show also repeats on the second subchannel during the week. Syndicated staples have included Jeopardy! and Inside Edition. The station's local commitments have occasionally collided with the network: on October 14, 1999, KFDA pre-empted an episode of the CBS drama Chicago Hope because a character used a profanity during a surgical scene, replacing it with local programming; general manager Mike Lee apologised for the network's choice, though not for the station's decision. For thirty-nine years, from 1973 to 2012, channel 10 was the Amarillo home of the Muscular Dystrophy Association's Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, usually on a three-hour delay after the late newscast. More recently, the station launched the weekday programme NewsChannel 10's 2nd Cup in September 2018, ran the morning talk show The Chat on its second subchannel from 2020 to 2024, and in 2025 agreed with the Amarillo Sod Poodles minor-league baseball team to air Sunday home games on that subchannel. In 2021, the Texas Panhandle Sports Network, a high school sports producer of more than twenty years' standing, merged into the NewsChannel 10 family, expanding live local sports across broadcast and streaming platforms.
Subchannels: A Six-Service Multiplex
KFDA-TV's multiplex is among the fullest in its market. Channel 10.1 carries CBS in 1080i high definition. Channel 10.2 is the independent NewsChannel 10 Too, home to extra newscasts, local talk and Sod Poodles baseball. Channel 10.3 simulcasts sister station KEYU's Telemundo Amarillo service, giving Spanish-language network programming a place on the KFDA signal. Channel 10.4 carries MeTV Amarillo, which replaced the station's 24/7 news and weather channel on June 4, 2018, that service continuing online. Channels 10.5 and 10.6 carry Cozi TV and Oxygen. The independent second channel has its own lineage: it descends from KZBZ, once the market's UPN affiliate, which became an independent when UPN closed and its successor network went elsewhere. Together, the six services turn a single CBS licence into a small programme family spanning network television, local news, Spanish-language programming and classic and lifestyle networks.
Technical Facilities and Translators
KFDA-TV today broadcasts digitally on VHF channel 10, its virtual channel also 10, under FCC facility ID 51466, with an effective radiated power of 62 kilowatts. It was a digital pioneer locally: it began transmitting a digital signal on September 1, 2002, the first Amarillo station to broadcast digitally and the first in the market to simulcast in high definition. It shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, the national transition date, moving its digital service to channel 10. Its transmitter stands at its Broadway Drive studio site in northern Amarillo, 466 metres above average terrain. Beyond that main signal's roughly seventy-five-mile corridor, translators rebroadcast channel 10 across the region, including facilities serving Childress, Clarendon, Clovis, Guymon, Memphis, Tucumcari, Tulia and Turkey. In a market where viewers may live a hundred miles from the studio, that translator web is not an accessory to the station; it is a substantial part of the station itself.
KFDA-TV Today
Seventy years on from a radio consortium's gamble on channel 10, KFDA-TV remains Amarillo's CBS station, as it has been every day since April 4, 1953. It has passed through the Texas State Network, the Bass family's Bass Broadcasting, more than thirty years of Drewry ownership, Raycom and Gray, survived a collapsed sale in the Great Recession, and led its market into digital and high-definition broadcasting. Its present form — NewsChannel 10, with the market's largest local news output, a six-channel multiplex, a Telemundo sister station and a translator network spanning three states — is the product of that whole history. For Panhandle viewers checking a tornado warning, watching the CBS evening schedule or following Friday-night high school football, channel 10 is not merely one choice among several. It is the region's longest-running television institution.
