The two stations studios atop Red Mountain (between Vulcan Trail and Valley View Drive) in southeastern Birmingham, where WBRC's transmitter is also located.

The station first signed on the air on July 1, 1949, originally broadcasting on VHF channel 4 as WBRC-TV (standing for Bell Radio Company, after Fountain Heights physician J. C. Bell, founder of radio station WBRC (960 AM, now WERC);[1] the "-TV" suffix was dropped from the call sign in June 1999).

This move was made to alleviate signal interference problems between WBRC and WSM-TV (now sister station WSMV-TV) in Nashville, which also transmitted on channel 4, that were present in portions of northern Alabama.

[5] George B. Storer, the company's founder and chairman, was a member of the board of directors at CBS, and most of his television stations were affiliates of that network.

NBC programming subsequently moved to channel 13 (by then, using the call sign WABT); both stations, however, retained a secondary affiliation with ABC.

On September 17 of that year, the WBRC stations moved to a new, much larger studio facility located on Red Mountain that was built by Storer, where channel 6 continues to operate from to this day.

[6] Storer had to sell its broadcast holdings in Birmingham after it purchased radio station WIBG (now WNTP) in Philadelphia and its television sister, WPFH (later WVUE) in Wilmington, Delaware (whose frequency is now occupied by WHYY-TV), to comply with the FCC's ownership limits of that time period.

This also marked a significant turnaround for channel 6's relationship with the network, as during the later 1950s, the amount of ABC programming on WBRC had been dramatically reduced from about 50% of its schedule to only a very limited selection of shows, seemingly headed toward an exclusive CBS affiliation by 1960; even still, WBRC retained some of CBS' higher-rated soap operas on its daytime schedule until about 1968, when those programs moved to either WAPI-TV or WBMG.

Another factor, though supposedly not as important as the Taft-Goldenson relationship, was CBS News' apparent strong support of the Civil Rights Movement, which did not sit well with many white viewers, a large segment of WBRC's audience.

An urban legend regarding the ABC affiliation agreement suggested that the switch was partly motivated by CBS' plans to air Who Speaks For Birmingham?, a controversial CBS Reports documentary focusing on desegregation at Birmingham City Schools that later led to journalist Howard K. Smith's resignation from CBS News after he quoted an anti-desegregation statement by political scientist Edmund Burke in the closing narration, viewed by network president William S. Paley as editorializing his views in support of school integration; however, the special aired on May 18 of that year, two months after the ABC agreement was signed.

Channel 6 could make a plausible claim to be not only the most-watched station in the Birmingham market but in the entire state of Alabama, thanks in part to unusually weak competition.

CBS affiliate WBMG (channel 42, now WIAT), which signed on in October 1965 as the market's third commercial television station, was not a factor and, in fact, was among the lowest-rated major-network affiliates in the nation at some points, making Birmingham a de facto two-station market to industry observers from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.

On May 5, 1994, Great American Communications (which would later be renamed Citicasters following the completion of its restructuring) agreed to sell WBRC and three other television stations – WDAF-TV in Kansas City, KSAZ-TV in Phoenix and WGHP in High Point, North Carolina – to New World Communications – for $350 million in cash and $10 million in share warrants.

On May 23, 1994, New World signed an affiliation agreement with Fox to switch twelve television stations – six that New World had already owned and eight that the company was in the process of acquiring through the Argyle and Citicasters deals, including WBRC – to the network, in exchange for the latter's then-parent company News Corporation purchasing a 20% equity stake in New World; the stations would become Fox affiliates once their affiliation contracts with existing network partners expired (with the first stations involved in the deal switching to the network in September 1994).

Fox was unable to immediately purchase the two stations outright due to questions over the American citizenship of then-parent company News Corporation's Australian-born CEO Rupert Murdoch.

This gave ABC a sufficient amount of time to find another station to replace channel 6 as its central Alabama affiliate.

In January 1996, ABC struck a deal with Allbritton Communications to affiliate with CBS stations WCFT-TV (channel 33, now Heroes & Icons affiliate WSES) in Tuscaloosa and WJSU-TV (channel 40, now Heroes & Icons affiliate WGWW) in Anniston (the latter of which Allbritton had agreed to operate under a local marketing agreement with then-owner Osborne Communications Corporation weeks prior); because Tuscaloosa and Anniston were then separate markets, which would result in neither station being counted in Nielsen ratings reports for Birmingham, Allbritton purchased low-power station W58CK (channel 58, now WBMA-LD), creating a triple-simulcast with WCFT and WJSU, which would act as its satellite stations.

After New World merged with Fox in 1997, WBRC was reunited with four of its sister stations from the Storer era: WJBK, WAGA-TV in Atlanta, WJW in Cleveland and WITI in Milwaukee.

However, on December 22, 2007, Fox announced that it had entered into an agreement to sell WBRC and seven other Fox owned-and-operated stations (WDAF-TV, WGHP, WJW, WITI, KTVI in St. Louis, KDVR in Denver and KSTU in Salt Lake City) to Local TV, a holding company operated by equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners that had earlier purchased The New York Times Company's television station division; the sale was finalized on July 14, 2008.

[19][20][21][22] On January 6, 2009, Local TV announced that it would trade WBRC to Raycom Media in exchange for acquiring CBS affiliate WTVR-TV in Richmond, Virginia from that group.

The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion—in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom—resulted in WBRC gaining new sister stations in adjacent markets, including ABC affiliate WTOK-TV in Meridian and CBS/NBC affiliates WTVY and WRGX-LD in Dothan (while separating it from WDFX), in addition to the current Raycom stations.

WBRC became the first television station to broadcast the United Cerebral Palsy Telethon, an event to raise money for the cerebral palsy research organization that premiered in 1949; it was from WBRC that the event emerged into national prominence, with national celebrities even making appearances on the telecast.

WBRC cemented viewer allegiances by carrying a heavy schedule of local programs during the 1960s and 1970s, most notably two long-running morning shows.

The first was The Morning Show, hosted by sports anchor Tom York; airing for 32 years from 1957 to 1989, it was a more general-interest interview and features program that was formatted basically a local version of Today; WBRC anchor Joe Langston (who also hosted the children's programs Birthday Party and Junior Auction for the station in the late 1960s) and comedian Fannie Flagg joined as York's co-hosts in the early 1960s (Flagg would leave for Los Angeles in 1964 to become a writer for Candid Camera).

Preemptions and out-of-pattern scheduling of some ABC programs would continue in later years; for example, WBRC aired All My Children on a one-day delay from its 1970 debut until it became a Fox station, and preempted the soap opera Loving throughout its 1986 to 1994 run.

In addition, the station produces Fox 6 Sideline, a high school football program that debuted in September 1989 as an ABC affiliate, which airs Friday nights after the 10 p.m. newscasts during the fall.

As a Fox station, WBRC has continued to maintain higher viewership than the other television news outlets in the market, although it has experienced tighter competition since the early 2000s against WBMA-LD and a resurgent WIAT (both of which currently engage in a spirited competition for second place); WBRC's 9 p.m. newscast has consistently ranked as one of the most-watched prime time newscasts in the U.S. for most of its run since its debut in 1996.

In 1978, WBRC became the first television station in the Birmingham market to acquire a microwave truck for electronic news-gathering purposes, and became the first to provide live breaking news coverage on-scene.

In 2009, WBRC became a founding member station of the Raycom News Network, a service created to allow the sharing of news resources among the four Raycom-owned television stations that serve Alabama – including NBC affiliate WSFA in Montgomery, NBC affiliate WAFF in Huntsville and ABC affiliate WTVM in Columbus, Georgia (the latter of which includes a portion of eastern Alabama in its service area) – which combined, cover almost half of Alabama's population.