Owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, the station maintains studios at 7 Broadcast Plaza in downtown Buffalo and a transmitter on Center Street in Colden.

For many years, it was carried via microwave to cable systems in such areas as Corning and Horseheads; this ended when WENY-TV signed on as the ABC affiliate for the Elmira market.

CapCities would serve as WKBW-TV's longest-tenured owner, owning it and its radio sister for 25 years, and the station would reach its peak during Capital Cities' ownership.

In Capital Cities Communications Inc v Canadian Radio-Television Commission, WKBW-TV argued that the CRTC did not have jurisdiction to enforce simultaneous substitution if the stations simulcasting an American program did not broadcast across a provincial line (in WKBW's case, the stations in question were in Toronto and Hamilton, both of which were primarily carried only in the province of Ontario).

When Capital Cities announced its acquisition of ABC in March 1985, it was required to divest stations to stay within Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership limits of the era.

[3][4] At that point, WKBW radio was sold to Price Communications and had its call letters changed to WWKB (that station is currently owned by Audacy).

WKBW-TV, through at least the early 2000s, operated the Niagara Frontier radio reading service on its second audio program feed, though it was pulled after the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy in 2004 due to content concerns and the FCC's stricter enforcement of obscenity laws, which included some RRS titles.

[7] On February 10, 2014, the E. W. Scripps Company announced that it would acquire WKBW-TV as well as MyNetworkTV affiliate WMYD in Detroit from Granite Broadcasting for $110 million.

With Scripps' acquisition of WKBW-TV, each of Buffalo's "Big Three" network affiliates have at one point or another been owned by a company with newspaper interests; WIVB-TV, founded in 1948 as WBEN-TV, was owned by the Butler family, then-owners of the Buffalo Evening News, from its inception until the early 1970s (and both had shared partial ownership by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway from 2014 to 2017, via BH's stake in Media General); Gannett Company, publishers of USA Today and various other newspapers around the country, acquired WGRZ-TV in 1996.

[14] Scripps chose not to retain WPXJ as Buffalo has fewer than eight unique television station owners, not enough to permit a duopoly in any case.

WKBW-TV's then-owner Granite Broadcasting filed for bankruptcy in 2006; as a result, the station group as a whole was hit hard by financial difficulties.

[24] As the Great Recession set in at the start of 2008, ABC prime time and syndicated early prime programming was often preempted with paid programming to make up lost revenue, but this practice has effectively ended as ABC has mandated full, in-pattern carriage of its schedule outside true breaking news and severe weather situations.

[26] Upon WKBW-TV general manager Bill Ransom's retirement, his replacement, Mike Nurse, made a concerted effort to reverse the damage done during Ransom's tenure, boosting the weather staff to four meteorologists (all of which are natives to Western New York), revamping the morning show with new hosts and a new name and moving to a three-man sports department.

The station had news operations from its beginning, but ceased broadcasting a 6 p.m. newscast in the fall of 1965, due to a mass exodus of viewers to WBEN-TV.

have contended this was due to Canadian viewers' attitudes that local Toronto television newscasts were "staid" and "boring" as contrasted with WKBW-TV's "tabloid" and "sensational" style of production, with American television stations approaching local news coverage as a "product" rather than a "public service", as is Canada's tradition.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Granite forced changes upon the station in the search for more profits from their stations at the cost of their longtime reputations (the same issues befell a sister ABC affiliate, WPTA, in Fort Wayne, Indiana), and refused to renew its longtime bedrock syndicated programming, including Oprah, which served as the lead-in for WKBW-TV's 5 p.m. news; rival WIVB-TV picked up the show along with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!

The replacement with lower-cost (and often lower-rated) syndicated programming, which often lasted less than three seasons, if even that, hastened the decline of channel 7's ratings, while WIVB took advantage of Granite's lack of investment in the former market leader.

The station's presentation of its newscasts had also grown incomparable to that of WGRZ and WIVB, often looking dated even at that time due to Granite's struggles to attain revenue and replace and add new on-air equipment and disinvested from supporting a news helicopter and weather department upgrades; when they did so, they instead purchased late-model equipment and software which made the station look 'small market', a jarring image compared to how its local and Canadian competitors treated Buffalo and Toronto as a competitive and broad multi-national market, with even Toronto stations becoming more aggressive in their reporting and imaging.

In September 2003, however, came the most damaging change, as Granite and management dropped the last remnants connecting channel 7 to its glory days under Capital Cities.

However, in April 2007, due to very poor ratings despite a barrage of heavy advertising, the Buffalo Sabres being in the playoffs and the upcoming 2007 NFL draft, Sportsnite was canceled.

Preliminary results were promising: due to this and WIVB-TV's carriage disputes with Time Warner Cable and Atlantic Broadband, WKBW-TV's newscasts climbed back to a strong second place, behind WGRZ.

[39] WKBW-TV's studio cameras are true HD; however, the bulk of the station's news video is produced in 4:3 standard definition, which is then upconverted to a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Brought in to host the newly branded Good Morning were out-of-market newcomers Cole Heath and Tiffany Lundberg, with meteorologist and feature reporter Mike Randall held over from the previous staff.

[40] In August 2014, one year after the revamp, Good Morning was canceled, Heath and Lundberg were fired, and Randall was demoted to weekends (at his request, to accommodate his acting career).

[44] On the evening news front, veteran anchorman Keith Radford was signed to a contract extension following the Scripps takeover while Sports Reporter Jeff Russo was promoted to co-anchor.

In December 2015, Co-Anchor, Joanna Pasceri, was replaced by newcomer, Ashley Rowe, who joined Keith Radford and Jeff Russo at the anchor desk.

As a result, WKBW's First Alert weather team had eight meteorologists on their payroll (including two freelancers and mostly off-air graphic artist Dave Vogan), by far the most of any station in the market.

Citing budget issues, WKBW released Paul after his two-year contract expired in December 2018;[45] he eventually returned to WIVB.

In 2020, WKBW and reporter Charlie Specht were honored with an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for an investigation into a church cover-up of child sexual abuse inside the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

[55] In October 2023, the station hired Michael Wooten, a longtime reporter and anchor for rival WGRZ, to host a new 5:30 p.m. newscast focusing on long-form interviews and features.