KWTX-TV: News 10 and Seven Decades of CBS in Waco
KWTX-TV, channel 10, is the CBS affiliate for Waco, Temple, Killeen and Central Texas, licensed to Waco, Texas, and owned by Gray Media. Broadcasting under the News 10 identity from studios on American Plaza in Waco, with a transmitter near Moody, the station is one of the oldest television outlets in Texas, having signed on April 3, 1955. It operates Bryan–College Station semi-satellite KBTX-TV, channel 3, and shares its Waco home with Belton-licensed CW affiliate KNCT. Across seven decades, KWTX has been Central Texas's CBS home, the station of record for events ranging from the first live televised trial in Texas history to the Branch Davidian siege of 1993, and the first station in its market to broadcast in digital high definition.
The call letters are a compressed map of the station's mission — Waco, Texas — and its history is inseparable from the radio station that shared them, KWTX radio, alongside which the television station was founded by Waco businessman Milford N. "Buddy" Bostick and his Texoma Broadcasting company.
1955: Sign-On in a Crowded, Confusing Market
KWTX-TV signed on April 3, 1955, as an independent station, entering a Waco market that was simultaneously over-served on paper and under-served in practice. Crosstown KANG-TV, channel 34, held affiliations with ABC, CBS and the dying DuMont network, but KANG was a UHF station at a time when many television sets could not receive UHF without a converter, and it was chronically short of money. KWTX, a VHF station on channel 10, had the decisive technical advantage. It picked up ABC in time for the fall 1955 season, and when DuMont collapsed, KANG became a full-time CBS station — briefly.
The contest ended quickly. At the end of 1955, KANG shut down, and KWTX acquired its assets in exchange for a 29 percent interest in the combined operation. With the merger, KWTX took over the CBS affiliation and has been Central Texas's primary CBS station ever since. In a pattern typical of 1950s television, however, "primary" did not mean exclusive: KWTX carried ABC as a secondary affiliation for many years, sharing it in various configurations with Temple's KCEN-TV, and at different points ABC even returned to primary status on channel 10, notably from 1977 to 1983, before the market's affiliation picture finally stabilized with KWTX as the CBS station, KCEN as NBC and, from 1985, KXXV as ABC.
A Station of Firsts: The Televised Trial and Early Innovation
KWTX built its reputation in its first years not just on network programming but on a willingness to bring television cameras where they had never been. The station is remembered in Texas broadcasting history for televising a criminal trial live in the mid-1950s — the first live televised trial in the state — an experiment in courtroom access that drew national attention at a time when cameras in court were fiercely debated across the country. The episode established a theme that would recur throughout KWTX's history: when a major Central Texas story unfolded, channel 10's cameras tended to be present, sometimes in ways that made history themselves.
The station's growth paralleled Waco's. Its radio sister was a fixture of local life, its television newscasts under the News 10 banner became the market's reference point, and its coverage area extended across the western half of the Waco–Temple–Bryan market, with KBTX-TV, launched in Bryan in 1957, serving as its semi-satellite for the eastern counties. The two stations simulcast network and syndicated programming but maintain separate local newscasts, commercials and identities, and they are counted together for ratings purposes — a partnership that has endured, under common ownership, for most of both stations' lives.
February 1993: KWTX and the Branch Davidian Raid
No event defines KWTX's national historical footprint like the morning of February 28, 1993, when agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel, outside Waco, to serve warrants on sect leader David Koresh. A KWTX news crew — reporter John McLemore and cameraman Dan Mulloney, with fellow cameraman Jim Peeler also on scene — had positioned themselves to cover the raid and instead found themselves inside one of the largest gun battles in American law-enforcement history, which killed four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians and opened a 51-day siege.
Mulloney's footage of agents exchanging fire with the Davidians was broadcast around the world, and the KWTX crew, the only independent witnesses on the scene, later helped transport wounded agents to safety and became central witnesses in the trials that followed. The crew's presence also became part of the controversy's enduring debate, as investigators examined how the media learned of the raid and whether the Davidians had been tipped off — scrutiny that Waco journalists, including KWTX's competitors at the Tribune-Herald, have revisited at every anniversary since. When the siege ended in fire on April 19, 1993, killing roughly 76 Davidians, KWTX again covered the story as both a local catastrophe and a global event. The station's archival coverage remains a primary source for understanding how Waco experienced those 51 days, and its journalists' recollections — including the human cost carried by crew members for years afterward — form one of the most sobering chapters in American local-news history.
Ownership: From Buddy Bostick to Gray Media
For its first four and a half decades, KWTX remained a locally rooted station, owned by Bostick's Texoma Broadcasting interests and their successors. That era ended on October 1, 1999, when Gray Television — then a growing Southeastern and Texas regional broadcaster — acquired channel 10. Gray's ownership brought KWTX into a portfolio that would eventually make it one of the largest station groups in the United States, a position cemented when Gray merged with Raycom Media in a $3.6 billion transaction announced in 2018 and closed in January 2019. KWTX survived the merger intact, in contrast to Waco's ABC pair KXXV and KRHD, which were divested to Scripps as a condition of the deal.
Under Gray, KWTX has operated alongside an expanding Central Texas cluster. Its semi-satellite KBTX remains the Brazos Valley's dominant local station, and in 2019 Gray added Belton's KNCT, the former PBS station for Central Texas, converting it to a commercial CW affiliate and relocating The CW from KWTX's own second subchannel. The group's shared resources — and Gray's market-leading news infrastructure — have kept News 10 at or near the top of the Waco ratings for most of the modern era.
News 10: The Market's News Tradition
KWTX's identity is built on local news to a degree unusual even among legacy VHF stations. The News 10 operation produces morning, midday, evening and late newscasts for the Waco side of the market, while KBTX produces its own full schedule for Bryan–College Station, and the combined operation blankets Central Texas with more local news hours than any competitor. Long-serving on-air figures have given the station unusual continuity; its weather department, led for decades by chief meteorologist Rusty Garrett from 1989 onward, became a trusted voice through countless Central Texas severe-weather outbreaks, in a region where tornado coverage is a life-safety service as much as a broadcast product.
The station has also cultivated the role of civic explainer, marking anniversaries of the Waco siege with documentary specials drawn from its own archive, covering Baylor University and Fort Cavazos — the vast Army installation near Killeen that shapes the market's western half — and reporting on the transformation of Waco itself, from a city long defined in outsiders' minds by 1993 to one reshaped by Baylor's growth and the Magnolia-driven tourism boom of the 2010s. That dual beat, tragedy remembered and revival documented, gives News 10 a uniquely layered relationship with its audience.
Digital Pioneer: HDTV, Subchannels and Telemundo
KWTX embraced digital television early. Its digital signal signed on May 11, 2001, making it the first station in Central Texas to broadcast in digital high definition, initially on channel 53 before moving to channel 10 when the analog era ended. Like most Texas stations, KWTX had planned to end analog broadcasting on February 17, 2009, and completed its digital-only operation with the national transition that year. Its transmitter plant is among the most powerful in the region, radiating from a tower more than 550 meters above average terrain near Moody.
The station's second subchannel has had an eventful life of its own. Launched in January 2006 as a UPN affiliate branded UPN Waco, it became The CW in September 2006 under the CW12 Central Texas brand, carrying the network for the Waco side of the market for more than a decade. On January 2, 2019, after Gray acquired KNCT and moved The CW there, KWTX repurposed 10.2 as Telemundo Central Texas, giving the market a full-time Spanish-language network service in partnership with KBTX, which carries the same feed for the Brazos Valley. Since 2022, the Telemundo operation has participated in the statewide Noticias Telemundo Texas collaboration between Gray and NBCUniversal's Telemundo Station Group, contributing Central Texas reporting to a shared Texas newscast — a notable expansion of Spanish-language local journalism in a market where it had historically been scarce.
Programming Beyond the News
Outside its newscasts, KWTX carries the complete CBS lineup — the network's morning and evening news programs, prime-time dramas and comedies, daytime serials and soap operas, late-night talk, and CBS Sports, including the network's college sports and NFL packages that anchor Texas weekend viewing. Its syndicated schedule has historically featured durable audience favorites in the hours around the network dayparts, and its Sunday schedule accommodates the religious and public-affairs programming traditional in Central Texas broadcasting, mirrored in part by KBTX's own Sunday-morning religious lineup in Bryan.
The station also serves as the television home of record for much of the region's institutional life: Baylor athletics coverage in news and sports segments, high-school football across dozens of Central Texas communities each autumn, and the agricultural and weather information on which the region's rural counties still depend. That breadth — network flagship, local newsroom, sports chronicler and farm-belt utility — is the classic profile of a legacy VHF affiliate, and KWTX has preserved it more completely than most.
KWTX in the Modern Central Texas Market
Today's Waco–Temple–Bryan market is more competitive than the one KWTX entered in 1955: ABC's KXXV with its Bryan semi-satellite KRHD, NBC's KCEN with its Brazos Valley partner KAGS, Fox's KWKT with KYLE, and Gray's own KNCT all contest the audience. Yet KWTX retains the advantages of incumbency — the market's oldest continuous network relationship, its deepest news archive, and a semi-satellite structure that gives it locally produced news in both halves of the market. Its website, kwtx.com, extends the News 10 brand into digital publishing for the whole region, including the Brazos Valley coverage of KBTX.
For media researchers, KWTX-TV offers a nearly complete cross-section of American broadcasting history in a single license: the chaotic affiliation scrambles of the 1950s, a pioneering courtroom broadcast, decades of local ownership, a news crew caught inside one of the defining federal law-enforcement disasters of the twentieth century, early adoption of high-definition television, and absorption into one of the industry's largest modern groups. Seventy years after Buddy Bostick put channel 10 on the air, KWTX remains what it became in 1956 — Central Texas's CBS station — and, through News 10, one of the central institutions of Waco civic life.
