At this time, the FCC had tightened its rules on cross-media ownership and had all but banned one person from owning newspapers and broadcast properties in the same market, while grandfathering existing combinations.

However, because of the way Allbritton's takeover of the Star was structured, the FCC considered it an ownership change and stripped the WMAL stations of their grandfathered protection.

WBRC, along with Piedmont Triad ABC affiliate WGHP, were placed in a blind trust in the fall of 1994, as the FCC prohibited a company from owning more than twelve television stations at the time.

Before WBRC became a Fox owned-and-operated station, Allbritton purchased WCFT-TV and WJSU-TV, and made them full power satellites of WBMA-LD; this prompted Allbritton to sign a groupwide affiliation deal with ABC which caused WCIV and Brunswick sister station WBSG-TV (now Ion Television O&O WBSG) to become ABC affiliates.

[12] In May 2013, reports surfaced that Allbritton was planning to sell its television stations; the move came as a result of the increasing success of Politico, which "continues to carry no debt, funds all investment with operating income and will still turn a profit, again, in 2013.

Sinclair would have sold its existing stations in several Allbritton markets—WABM and CW in Birmingham, Alabama and WHP-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Deerfield Media, and WMMP in Charleston, South Carolina to Howard Stirk Holdings, a company owned by conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams.

In December 2013, FCC Video Division Chief Barbara Kreisman sent a letter demanding information from Sinclair Broadcast Group on the financial aspects of its "sidecar" operations, and warned that in these three markets, "the proposed transactions would result in the elimination of the grandfathered status of certain local marketing agreements and thus cause the transactions to violate our local TV ownership rules."

[20][21] Sinclair restructured the deal in March 2014, choosing to sell its existing stations in Harrisburg (WHP-TV), Charleston (WCIV) and Birmingham (WABM) and terminate an SSA with the Cunningham-owned Fox affiliate in Charleston to acquire Allbritton's WCIV, WHTM-TV, and WBMA-LD, while also creating a new duopoly between the WBMA-LD and CW affiliates in Birmingham), as well as foregoing any operational or financial agreements with the buyers of the stations being sold to other parties.

The site merged the web pages of the company's television stations, WJLA-TV (Channel 7) and its cable sibling, NewsChannel 8.