WGWW (channel 40) is a television station licensed to Anniston, Alabama, United States, serving the eastern portion of the Birmingham market as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Heroes & Icons.

WGWW's transmitter is located at Bald Rock Mountain (off of Kelly Creek Road), near Moody in unincorporated southern St. Clair County.

WGWW operates as a full-time satellite of Tuscaloosa-licensed WSES (channel 33), whose advertising sales office is located on Golden Crest Drive in Birmingham.

WGWW covers areas of northeastern Alabama that receive a marginal to non-existent over-the-air signal from WSES, although there is significant overlap between the two stations' contours otherwise, including in Birmingham proper.

However, the show was hampered by changes in the television industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s decision in the early 1970s to prohibit children's hosts from promoting products directly on-air, forcing channel 40 to cancel the program by the summer of 1972.

WHMA-TV ultimately reached approximately 100,000 households across east-central Alabama, and management fought almost constantly to ensure that Arbitron maintained the distinction of Anniston as a separate television market from those encompassing the larger metropolitan areas of Birmingham and Atlanta.

As was the case with WCFT, CBS opted to retain its affiliation with WHMA—despite the fact that Anniston is 35 miles (56 km) to the northeast of Birmingham—because, at the time, WBMG suffered from a weak broadcast signal that did not provide adequate coverage throughout most of the central third of Alabama.

Even after WBMG increased its transmitter power to 1.2 million watts in 1969, channel 42 still had a very marginal to non-existent signal in much of east-central Alabama, which lies within the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, which like other areas of rugged terrain, often experienced impaired over-the-air reception of UHF television stations.

In 1984, the FCC—which protected the combination of WHMA-AM-FM-TV and the Anniston Star under a grandfather clause from forced divestiture, when the agency prohibited common ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market in 1967—forced the Ayers family to break up its media empire.

As part of a broader deal between New World and the Fox Broadcasting Company signed on May 23 of that year, New World agreed to affiliate five of its eight existing television stations and the four it had acquired from Great American with Fox, in a series of affiliation transactions that would take two years to complete due to the varying conclusion dates of their ongoing contracts with either ABC, NBC or CBS.

[8] Due to conflicts with FCC ownership rules of the time period, New World subsequently decided to establish and transfer the licenses of WBRC and WGHP into a trust company, with the intent to sell them to the Fox network's broadcasting subsidiary, Fox Television Stations (in the case of Birmingham, New World could not keep WBRC and WVTM since the FCC then forbade a single company from owning two television stations in the same market; the concurrent Argyle and Citicasters acquisitions also put New World three stations over the FCC's twelve-station ownership limit).

However, the owner of WTTO, Sinclair Broadcast Group, only expressed interest in carrying ABC's prime time and news programming.

Then in January 1996, after it terminated the WNAL deal, Allbritton acquired the non-license assets of CBS affiliate WJSU-TV (channel 40) in Anniston from Osborne Communications Corporation for $12 million (through an LMA arrangement which included an option to eventually purchase the station outright).

[11] However under Nielsen rules, neither WCFT nor WJSU would have likely been counted in the Birmingham ratings books as it had designated Tuscaloosa and Anniston as separate markets at the time.

[19] On March 20, 2014, as part of a restructuring of the Sinclair-Allbritton deal in order to address these ownership conflicts as well as to expedite the Allbritton acquisition because of them due to the FCC's increased scrutiny of outsourcing agreements used to circumvent in-market ownership caps, Sinclair announced that it would retain ownership of WTTO (choosing to retain the LMA between that station and WDBB, and continue operating it as a satellite station of WTTO), and form a new duopoly between it and WBMA+; WABM was to be sold to a third-party buyer with which Sinclair would not enter into an operational outsourcing arrangement or maintain any contingent interest, other than a possible transitional shared facilities agreement until WTTO was able to move its operations from its longtime home on Beacon Parkway West to WBMA's facility in Hoover.

[26] Ten days later on September 28, Sinclair filed an application with the FCC to sell the license assets of WJSU-TV to Howard Stirk Holdings (a group owned by conservative political commentator Armstrong Williams, who has ties to Sinclair as his political affairs program, The Armstrong Williams Show, airs on many of the group's stations and is produced at the studios of its Washington flagship station WJLA-TV).

Howard Stirk Holdings had reached a similar deal to acquire WCFT-TV for the purchase amount four days earlier on September 24.

In order for Sinclair to continue operating WJSU and WCFT and maintain their existing licenses until the FCC ruled on the petition and the sale to HSH, the two stations began providing interim programming as affiliates of Heartland (which both stations had been carrying on their third digital subchannels as WBMA satellites since the network launched as The Nashville Network on November 1, 2012) on October 20, 2014; although neither technically operated as WBMA satellites any longer (even though all three maintained affiliations with Heartland), master control for the two stations continued to originate from the Hoover studios of WBMA+, which continued to handle the sale of local advertising.