[4] From the fall of 1967 to summer of 1970, WFLD aired the final hour of CBS' Saturday daytime schedule from noon to 1 p.m., in lieu of the network's owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV (channel 2).

[5][6] At the time, the Field interests were concerned about running afoul of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s recent scrutiny of commonly owned multiple media outlets within the same market.

There were two versions of the showcase: the original incarnation of the series began on the station on September 18, 1970, under the title Screaming Yellow Theatre, with local disc jockey Jerry G. Bishop doing scary voices and later wearing a long green wig while portraying the character.

Bishop became such a hit with viewers that the show was popularly called "Svengoolie" after his character (although the title of the program did not change), and this version lasted until late in the summer of 1973.

The show was revived on WCIU-TV (channel 26) when it became an English-language independent station in December 1994, and has aired there locally ever since, and began to be broadcast nationally on MeTV in April 2011.

When the deal was completed in July 1973, the two companies' new partnership resulted in WFLD joining Kaiser's stable of UHF independent stations—KBHK-TV in San Francisco, WKBG-TV in Boston, WKBS-TV in Philadelphia, WKBF-TV in Cleveland, and WKBD-TV in Detroit.

The station also acquired the rights to I Love Lucy that year, and later added Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman and Star Trek in 1982.

WFLD scored no big ticket program acquisitions in 1980 or 1981; however, in 1982, the station won the local syndication rights to popular series such as Three's Company, Taxi and Mork and Mindy.

By mere coincidence given Field's previous aborted attempt to sell channel 32 to that group, the one company that showed interest in WFLD was Metromedia, owners of WNEW-TV in New York City, which led the independent stations in that market and beat Tribune-owned WPIX in the ratings there.

[19][20] As a condition, Metromedia was forced by the FCC to divest radio station WMET (95.5 FM, now WCHI-FM), which it sold to Doubleday Broadcasting.

In May 1985, Metromedia reached an agreement to sell WFLD-TV and its five sister independent stations—WNEW-TV in New York City, KTTV in Los Angeles, WTTG in Washington, D.C., KRLD-TV in Dallas–Fort Worth and KRIV in Houston—to News Corporation, owned by Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, for $2.55 billion (ABC affiliate WCVB-TV in Boston, the company's only network-affiliated station, was originally to be sold as well through the deal, but upon exercising a right of first refusal clause related to Metromedia's 1982 purchase of that station, it was spun off to the Hearst Corporation's television and radio station subsidiary, Hearst Broadcasting, for $450 million in a separate, concurrent deal).

The station's continued to carry its cartoon block on weekday afternoons, and top-rated off-network sitcoms in the evening hours; it also added more first-run talk and court shows.

This was due to the perceived embarrassment of being on a UHF analog channel in the third-largest market in the United States, especially considering that The WB was carried on VHF station WGN-TV.

WFLD acquired the rights to broadcast Major League Baseball games from the Chicago White Sox in 1968, assuming the contract from WGN-TV.

In October 1988, the station filed a lawsuit against the White Sox club to terminate its television contract with the team, which was set to last through 1991, accusing team owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn of "gutting and stripmining the[...] team of salary investment, player quality and fan goodwill" which resulted in a decline in viewership for the games and profit losses for the station on the contract (WFLD's profits from the telecasts slid from $1.5 million profit in 1985 to a loss of $1.4 million in 1988, resulting in the rights fees costing four times more than the accrued revenue; ratings during that three-year period also dropped from a 5.1 share in 1985 to a 1.7 in August 1988) as well as breached advertising agreements with the Chicagoland Dodge Dealers consortium.

Consequently, in addition to already carrying most regular season and select preseason games through Fox, it began airing preseason games through the team's syndication service as well as other Bears-related programming during the NFL season including the pre-game and post-game shows Bears Gameday Live (on Sunday mornings) and Bears GameNight Live (which follows The Final Word on Sunday evenings).

[41] Since 2018, WFLD has, through Fox, then through Amazon Prime Video, also aired any Bears games that are part of the Thursday Night Football package.

[42] After Nite Owl was discontinued in 1982, WFLD began airing an hour-long simulcast of CNN Headline News during the overnight hours, as well as in the early afternoon on weekdays.

[46] Originally anchored by Kris Long and Robin Robinson Brantley (the latter of whom remained the station's lead anchor until November 2013[47]), the two programs aired separately for a year until both newscasts were consolidated into a single half-hour program to compete with the 9 p.m. newscast on then-independent station WGN-TV in November 1987,[48] at which time the weekend editions were also canceled due to low ratings.

WFLD programmed news outside its established 9 p.m. slot for the first time on June 28, 1993, when it premiered a weekday morning newscast, Good Day Chicago.

[56] On April 9, 2007, WFLD premiered a half-hour 10 p.m. newscast called The TEN, anchored by David Novarro and former WLS-TV and WBBM-TV anchor/reporter Lauren Cohn.

The program (according to Robert Feder's April 18, 2007, column in the Chicago Sun-Times) beat CBS-owned WBBM-TV's 10 p.m. newscast on its second day on the air.

[57] Despite its early success against WBBM-TV, The TEN was overall never much of a factor in the ratings; towards the end of its run, it fell to a distant fifth behind established late-news competitors WBBM, WLS-TV and WMAQ-TV, and Family Guy reruns on WGN-TV.

[60] On July 5, 2016, WFLD launched an hour-long, weekday-only newscast at 5 p.m, becoming the fifteenth Fox-owned station and the fifth television station in Chicago to air a late-afternoon newscast; the program competes against with half-hour early evening news programs on established competitors WBBM-TV, WMAQ-TV and WLS-TV and the second hour of WGN-TV's Evening News block.

[61] On March 30, 2017, WFLD announced that it would expand the length of Good Day Chicago to six hours, with the addition of a half-hour to the start of the program at 4 a.m.; ironically, when the expansion took place on April 10, WFLD became the third station in Chicago to expand its morning newscast into that time period (following WGN-TV, which began its expansion into the 4 a.m. hour in July 2011 and WMAQ-TV, which launched a 4 a.m. newscast in August 2015).

In recent Nielsen ratings sweeps periods, WFLD has been mired in last place among the late evening (9 or 10 p.m.) newscasts seen on the market's five English-language news-producing stations.