Fiktiv USA - KSWB-TV

KSWB-TV, virtual channel 69 (UHF digital channel 26), is a CW-affiliated television station licensed to San Diego, California, United States. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group. KSWB-TV's studios are located on Engineer Road in the city's Kearny Mesa section (within a quarter-mile to the west of the studios of CBS affiliate KFMB-TV, channel 8), and its transmitter is located southeast of Spring Valley.

KSWB-TV is branded as CW 5 San Diego, in reference to its primary cable channel position in the market on most local cable providers (it is also carried in Baja California, Mexico on Izzi channel 92). KSWB-TV is also available on DirecTV to serve the few areas of the western United States where the CW's programming is not available through a local station.

The station first signed on the air on October 1, 1984 as KTTY. The station originally operated from studios located on Frontage Road in Chula Vista. Originally locally owned by San Diego Television, it operated as an independent station; it maintained a general entertainment format featuring a mix of dramas, classic movies, cartoons and religious programming that the other stations in the market declined to air. KTTY also aired a significant amount of paid programming. The station suffered from low ratings throughout its run as an independent station, struggling to compete with established independents XETV-TV (channel 6) and KUSI-TV (channel 51). On January 11, 1995, KTTY became the San Diego charter affiliate of The WB, an upstart broadcast network that was majority owned by the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner.

The station fell into bankruptcy, and Tribune Broadcasting, whose corporate parent—the Tribune Company—owned the remaining stake in The WB that Time Warner did not maintain, purchased the station at a bankruptcy auction in 1995, and took control of it in 1996; on August 16 of that year, the company changed the station's call letters to KSWB-TV (for "San Diego's WB," which served as the station's slogan for most of its tenure with The WB). After Tribune took ownership of channel 69, the station added many off-network sitcoms to its schedule, with talk and court shows being mixed in as well throughout the remainder of the 1990s.

On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down the broadcast networks that they had respectively owned, The WB and UPN. In their place, the companies would combine The WB and UPN's respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW (a name that represents the first initials of each of the network's corporate parents), which would also include newer series developed for the network. With the announcement, The CW signed a ten-year affiliation agreement with Tribune Broadcasting for 16 of the group's 19 WB affiliates, with KSWB-TV named as the network's San Diego affiliate.

The CW officially launched on September 18, 2006 (Entravision-owned UPN affiliate XHUPN-TV in nearby Tecate, Baja California, Mexico joined MyNetworkTV, another startup network run by Fox Entertainment Group that launched two weeks prior to The CW's debut, and changed its callsign to XHDTV-TV). Unlike many other former WB affiliates that also had call letters relating to its former affiliation, KSWB chose to retain the callsign that references the now-defunct network. The station also served as the local broadcaster of games from the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, which were produced by Los Angeles sister station KTLA (KTLA itself would lose the broadcast rights to the Clippers to regional sports networks Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket in 2009).

On December 3, 2018, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Media Group announced it would acquire the assets of Tribune Media for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. The deal—which made Nexstar the largest television station operator by total number of stations upon closure of the deal—gave KSWB-TV additional sister stations nearby markets including in Bakersfield (where the group already owns NBC affiliate KGET-TV and low-power Telemundo affiliate KKEY-LP), Fresno (where it owns NBC affiliate KSEE and CBS affiliate KGPE) and San Francisco (MyNetworkTV affiliate KRON-TV). The sale was approved by the FCC on September 16, and was completed on September 19, 2019.

Outside of the CW network schedule, syndicated programming broadcast by KSWB-TV (as of October 2020) includes Rachael Ray, The Drew Barrymore Show, Judge Judy, Two and a Half Men, Family Guy, Daily Mail TV, Modern Family, Bob's Burgers and The Goldbergs.

KSWB-TV presently broadcasts 59¾ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 11¼ hours each weekday and 1¾ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays); in addition, the station produces the 15-minute sports highlight program CW 5 Sports Final, which airs every night at 10:45 p.m.

As a WB affiliate, KSWB launched its first news department on September 27, 1999 with the debut of a half-hour 10:00 p.m. newscast (called WB News at Ten); the news operation was formed as a result of a corporate request by Tribune for its WB-affiliated stations that did not already have news departments to begin producing their own local newscasts. This program was designed to compete against an established hour-long prime time newscast on KUSI and gained a competitor in XETV-TV's upstart news department when it launched its own newscast at 10:00 p.m. that December. On March 7, 2005, the station debuted The WB Morning Show, a simulcast of Los Angeles sister station KTLA's weekday morning newscast interspersed with half-hourly local news inserts presented by a solo anchor from KSWB's San Diego studios.

On September 22, 2005, KSWB announced that its news department would be shut down, laying off 29 of the department's 30 staffers (with the exception of Jeff Powers, who continued to anchor the 10:00 p.m. newscast until he left the station). The final 10:00 p.m. newscast produced by KSWB aired on October 28, 2005. Production of the prime time newscast was turned over to NBC station KNSD (channel 39) through a news share agreement on October 31. The broadcast retained the WB News at Ten title and the 615 Music-composed music package Firepower News (which was originally commissioned by KSWB for its in-house newscasts), but now originated from KNSD's then-facility at 225 Broadway in downtown San Diego (local cut-ins during The WB Morning Show continued to originate from KSWB's Kearny Mesa studios).

To correspond with KSWB's affiliation change to The CW, the KTLA morning news simulcast and the KNSD-produced 10:00 p.m. news were accordingly renamed as The CW Morning Show and CW News at Ten on September 18, 2006. KNSD reporter Anne State assumed co-anchoring duties until April 2008, when she left for Chicago CBS owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV. Vic Salazar then solo anchored the 10:00 p.m. broadcast for the final months of KNSD's production of the program, until he left that station. In addition, the station also produced a public affairs show called Take 5, that aired Sunday evenings at 10:30 p.m.

KTLA simulcast and KNSD-produced 10:00 p.m. news aired for the last time on July 31, 2008. On August 1, KSWB reassumed production responsibilities for its newscasts with the debuts of a new weekday morning news program (initially airing from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m.) and a now hour-long 10:00 p.m. newscast, which have both been produced in high definition since the return of in-house news operations.

On September 14, 2009, KSWB debuted an hour-long 6:00 p.m. newscast that competes against local newscasts on KUSI-TV (an hour-long program), KNSD and KGTV (channel 10) (both a half-hour at 6:00 p.m.), KFMB-TV (channel 8) (at 6:30) and evening network newscasts on the latter three stations. This was followed two years later on September 26, 2011 by the launch of an hour-long 5:00 p.m. newscast on weeknights; that broadcast was quietly expanded to weekend evenings in May 2014. On September 8, 2014, KSWB debuted two one-hour newscasts at 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. on weekday afternoons.

KSWB-TV is described as a CNN affiliate by the cable news network. Both news operations conduct live shots, air packages, publish stories online, and more with each other. CNN has an "author" page on KSWB-TV's website.

The station has many elements to it that reflect Southern Californian culture. They frequently feature celebrities as guests on their morning news program, many of them San Diego natives. During the morning broadcast, some weather segments are branded as the "Surf Report". Some female KSWB-TV on-air personalities have been featured in annual "Hottest News Chick" contests. The morning show also features a recurring live interview segment with KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin. The top "water cooler talk" entertainment stories of the morning is the topic of discussion.