WBAL-TV began operations on March 11, 1948, from its original studios on North Charles Street in Downtown Baltimore.

WBAL-TV is one of two Hearst-owned broadcast properties to have been built and signed on by the company (the other being WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh), and the oldest to be continuously owned by Hearst through its various television subsidiaries through the years.

Another long-running show of the 1950s was the weekday Quiz Club, co-hosted by local personalities Brent Gunts and Jay Grayson.

[5] Baltimore Sun local history columnist Jacques Kelly described it at the time of Grayson's death in June 2000, as "pure 1950s live television ... executed on a low budget ... the genial hosts ... ruled the 1 p.m.

It also launched several children's entertainment shows during this period, such as Rhea and Sunshine, Pete the Pirate, P. W. Doodle, Heads Up, and the teen-oriented rock and roll music and the mid-1960s teen dancing on the Kerby Scott Show which introduced its "mod" fashions and "hippie" culture style of rock music to the area.

[7][8] On March 3, 1981, CBS announced that it would be ending its 33-year affiliation with WMAR-TV, then owned by the A. S. Abell Company (then-publishers of the Baltimore Sun), and moving its programming to WBAL-TV.

Among its reasons for making the switch, CBS cited channel 11's strength in local news ratings and overall non-network programming as opposed to WMAR-TV, which heavily preempted the network in favor of syndicated programs, local public affairs and sports coverage; CBS also cited low ratings for WMAR's newscasts.

The last NBC program to air on channel 11 until 1995 was a rerun from the evening before the switch of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, with host George Carlin.

[11][12] On June 16, 1994, the E. W. Scripps Company, present owners of WMAR-TV, negotiated with ABC to affiliate with its Baltimore station as part of a multi-station deal also involving KNXV-TV in Phoenix and WFTS-TV in Tampa.

[20][21] The final CBS program to air on channel 11 before it rejoined NBC was the made-for-TV movie A Father for Charlie at 9 p.m. Eastern Time; this was directly followed by an hour-long program explaining the switch, which preempted an airing of the Chicago Hope episode "Heartbreak" (which could still be viewed in much of the market via WUSA).

[22] During its initial run as an NBC affiliate, WBAL-TV preempted the first season of Saturday Night Live (which was titled NBC's Saturday Night) because of concerns regarding its fairly edgy content for the time; instead, the station aired movies in the comedy show's time slot throughout that season.

[23] When it cleared the network's entire late night Saturday lineup in the summer of 1976, the station purchased it mainly for the monthly newsmagazine Weekend, on which the sketch program's Weekend Update segments are based, and which NBC insisted the station pick up alongside SNL as part of a package deal.

[24] As a CBS affiliate, WBAL-TV preempted an hour of the network's daytime schedule every day, as well as half of its Saturday morning cartoon lineup.

The architect of the success was news director Ron Kershaw, who had come to Baltimore from Texas and was considered somewhat ahead of his time.

On January 3, 2009, WBAL-TV became the second station in Baltimore (behind WBFF) to begin broadcasting its local news programming in high definition.

[30] WBAL-TV became the first Baltimore television station to win a Peabody Award for local news coverage, specifically of their Chesapeake Bay pollution investigation (and the first Baltimore television station to win the award in any category in more than fifty years).

As part of the renewal, Hearst also signed agreements to add the network as digital subchannels of WBAL-TV and sister stations KCRA-TV in Sacramento, WCVB-TV in Boston, KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City and WXII-TV in Greensboro.