A highly rated and influential program, it was commonplace that on a typical day in the 1970s, over two-thirds of all television sets in the Cleveland market were tuned to The Morning Exchange.

It was the first morning show to use a "living room" set and establish the now familiar concept of news and weather segments at the top and bottom of the hour.

In a 2006 interview, Ken Lowe, the CEO of Scripps-Howard Broadcasting said, "The Morning Exchange was a huge risk that Don Perris took at the time.

[3] In March 1972, Don Webster briefly left WEWS and was replaced by Liz Richards, who became a co-host and the weather presenter.

This followed years of her personal life and her volatile marriage to Cleveland disc jockey Gary Dee spilling over into the headlines on other news outlets.

In 1990, Jon Loufman (now with CBS affiliate WOIO, channel 19) joined the show and provided weather reports and a number of live shots.

On September 12, 1994, WJW-TV, as part of a group-wide deal involving the station's then-owner New World Communications,[6] dropped its CBS affiliation and joined Fox.

However, in addition to agreeing to stay with ABC, Scripps lost most of the remaining leverage for local schedule control it had for the network.

By 1994, WEWS was the only ABC station remaining among the 25 largest television markets in the country that did not broadcast the full two hours of GMA.

The only remaining advantage for WEWS was that ABC's late morning programming at the time, including Home, Mike and Maty, and Caryl & Marilyn: Real Friends, was wholly uncompetitive nationwide, had no ownership stake by ABC, and was easily pushed into the late night graveyard slot, as WEWS did with all three series in favor of MX.

In an unusual move, WEWS slotted the syndicated (and at the time, half-hour) Martha Stewart Living program in the middle of the MX broadcast, making it appear as if it was an extended segment of the show.

In 1998, major changes occurred to the program: it was retitled Today's Morning Exchange and was soon reduced to one hour, in an attempt to save the declining show.

WEWS had continued to delay The View to late night until January 18, 1999, when it began to air in its proper 11 a.m. time slot, leaving MX with little natural flow between Live!

Fred Griffith was demoted to a field reporter with morning meteorologist Mark Johnson taking his place as co-host, along with former WJW-TV news anchor Robin Swoboda.