The station signed on the air on September 10, 1983, as an independent station and aired an analog signal on UHF channel 23.[3] The station was originally owned by Cape Girardeau Family Television, Ltd., in turn 51 percent owned by Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was not the first independent to operate in the market—two stations broadcast in southern Illinois, and a prior attempt had been made at an independent in Paducah[4]—but it was the first to cover all of it, which was the reason Media Central had been attracted to the area.[5]
Media Central filed for bankruptcy in 1987 to fend off a hostile takeover attempt.[6] That same year, despite having passed on the opportunity a year prior,[7] KBSI joined Fox on September 7, in part because of the Media Central bankruptcy.[8][9] Media Central continued to own the station until a bankruptcy judge approved its acquisition by Engles Communications, owned by David Engles, a former Warner Bros. and NBC radio executive.[10] Under Engles, KBSI picked up the first season of NYPD Blue when ABC affiliate WSIL-TV refused to air the show.[11]
Engles then sold the station to Max Television (later Max Media Properties) in 1995.[12] In 1998, Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired most of the Max Media Properties stations, including KBSI; it owned KBSI and later WDKA in Paducah until both were sold to Community News Media for $28 million in a transaction that closed in 2021.[13]
From 2006 to September 30, 2010, NBC affiliate WPSD-TV (owned by the Paxton Media Group) produced a nightly prime time newscast for KBSI through a news share agreement.[14] When the WPSD newscast started, KBSI competed with another nightly half-hour newscast at 9 p.m. on the area's low-poweredCW affiliates WQTV-LP/WQWQ-LP. That newscast, produced by CBS affiliate KFVS-TV, focused on news from southeastern Missouri and was eventually canceled on July 29, 2007.[15]
On October 1, 2010, KBSI entered into a new agreement with KFVS to produce the newscast, which expanded to an hour in length. This agreement ended in March 2022 with KFVS moving the newscast to KFVS-DT2. On March 28, 2022, KBSI debuted its own newscast, produced out of Lincoln, Nebraska, at sister station KLKN. The news and weather anchors are based in Lincoln while the reporters work out of the KBSI studios in Cape Girardeau.
KBSI shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 23, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on 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 to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 22,[17] using virtual channel 23.
^Sanders, Matt (August 2, 2007). "KFVS drops 9 p.m. news". The Southeast Missourian. Archived from the original on August 21, 2007. Retrieved August 14, 2021.
(*) – indicates station is in one of Illinois' primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Illinois
(*) – indicates station is in one of Kentucky's primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Kentucky
(*) – indicates station is in one of Tennessee's primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Tennessee
