The station is owned by Hearst Television and maintains studios and transmitter facilities on Channel 16 Way (off MS 18) in southwest Jackson.

Under several owners, it had generally been the third-rated station for local news in the market, a historic position attributable to its late entrance and smaller coverage area in the 1970s and 1980s.

[4] By March 1969, American Public Life had announced in its 1968 annual report to shareholders that construction activities were underway and the station, dubbed WAPT, was negotiating with ABC for affiliation.

[5] However, that November, MacLendon died of a heart attack in a Miami hospital; he had fallen ill on a business trip to Central America.

[13] Three years later, Clay Broadcasting of Charleston, West Virginia, acquired WAPT for $7.5 million from the group, promising improvements in the news department, which continued to badly lag even though ABC was the number-one network at the time.

[18][19] For a time in 1991, Appleton traveled to Jackson to run the station directly, relieving the general manager, who was recovering from brain surgery.

[28] In 2005, Sacha Baron Cohen appeared as his Borat character in a news interview while secretly filming a segment for the movie of the same name.

The station had been told by a publicist that the appearance was for a Bulgarian television documentary and was provided a fake website to that effect.

After the film's release the next year, Dharma Arthur, a news producer for WAPT, wrote a letter to Newsweek saying that Borat's appearance on the station had led to her losing her job: "Because of him, my boss lost faith in my abilities and second-guessed everything I did thereafter...How upsetting that a man who leaves so much harm in his path is lauded as a comedic genius."

[40] News director Bob Noonan, who had been on the job only seven weeks, defended the firings as necessary to "put a more competitive team on the field".

[46][47] As part of the SAFER Act, WAPT kept its analog signal on the air until June 26 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.