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KFVS12 - KFVS-TV - is the CBS affiliate of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and the news station of "the Heartland": the four-state region where southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois, western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee meet along the Mississippi. Owned by Gray Media and broadcasting from the Hirsch Tower in downtown Cape Girardeau, it serves more than fifty counties with CBS and CW programming and more than thirty hours of local news each week, and its newscasts also stream live online.

The call letters were assigned at random by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, but locals have long read "Five States" into them - fitting for a station whose viewing area touches four. Sister stations WSIL and KPOB cover southern Illinois from Carterville, while Telemundo affiliate WQWQ-LD shares the Cape Girardeau studios.

Heartland News and First Alert Weather

The schedule is built on Heartland News: morning, evening, late and prime-time editions, including the 9 p.m. hour revived in 2010 through a news-share agreement and now carried on the CW subchannel. The weather operation works a region where tornado tracks cross three states: First Alert Weather draws on the First Alert Doppler Network of regional National Weather Service radars, while the station's own Live StormTeam Radar atop the Hirsch building is the market's only truly live radar, giving Heartland viewers a real-time edge when storms cross the Bootheel. Heartland Sports rounds out the day with local teams from fifty counties.

The Station That Started Without Cameras

KFVS signed on 3 October 1954 under Oscar C. Hirsch, the radio pioneer who had put the area's first radio station on the air from his shop in 1925 - and because channel 12 initially had no video cameras, its first broadcast showed slides of the transmitter tower as it was being built. Hirsch sold the station to Aflac in 1979; it passed into Raycom Media in 1997 and arrived at Gray Television with the 2019 merger, gaining an in-market sibling when Gray added WSIL-TV in May 2026. Local newscasts went high definition in 2011 with a rebuilt studio.

The Heartland's Channel Map

The main signal carries CBS on 12.1 and the CW on 12.2, with MeTV, Outlaw, Grit and Oxygen True Crime filling the multiplex alongside Telemundo sister WQWQ-LD - a full menu for a market that stretches from the Ozark foothills to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. On cable, KFVS was for decades the default CBS station as far south as Jonesboro, Arkansas, until that city gained its own affiliate in 2015; the Heartland brand, meanwhile, travels with the weather desk, the newscasts and the four-state identity the station has carried since the Hirsch family first put channel 12 on the air.

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