with that station for first place as the most-watched television newscast in the Oklahoma City market in most news timeslots. KWTV had the highest-rated late evening newscast in the United States during the May 2006 sweeps period, and its 10:00 p.m. newscast was the top-rated newscast in the nation in May 2007, and locally during the February 2012 sweeps. News department history Channel 9's news department began operations when the station signed on the air on December 20, 1953, when it debuted a half-hour newscast at 10:00 p.m. (broken up, respectively, into 15-minute-long weather and news segments), anchored by Mark Weaver. Bruce Palmer, former news director at WKY (930 AM) and eventual national president of the Radio-Television News Editors Association, headed channel 9's news department as its director of news operations until his retirement from broadcasting in 1966. Palmer also conducted weekly editorial segments that dealt with pertinent local issues; the station's editorials, which continued for several years after Palmer's departure, would help earn KWTV several journalistic honors in subsequent years, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award and the National Headliners Club Award. To enable mobility in shooting spot news content, in 1955, KWTV staff photographer Bill Horton devised a saddle-based shoulder camera rig with a port to insert wet cell batteries on the saddle's rear and an Auricon Cine-Voice audio control panel (which was hooked to a dictaphone-style earpiece to monitor the audio recording) at front. By 1959, the station had launched a half-hour noon newscast and a 15-minute-long early evening newscast that led into the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards. KWTV is purported to be the first television station in the Oklahoma City market to conduct consumer and investigative reporting, the first to utilize beat reporters, and was the first television station in the United States to air a consumer-investigative news program, Call for Action, which was based on a KOMA radio show of the same title. In 1962, assignment reporter Ed Turner (who later become the inaugural executive vice president of CNN upon the channel's launch in June 1980) received accolades for a series of reports on James Meredith, who in October of that year, became the first African American to enroll into and attend the University of Mississippi and whose entry led to civil unrest and rioting at the campus. From 1966 to 1971, KWTV utilized the Eyewitness News format, as it was becoming popular