A trio of WMAZ-TV employees—Lloyd Harris, Stan Carey, and Bill Manly—formed Broadcasting Dynamics and began planning a third station, which prompted WMAZ to fire them in September 1977.

[6] Just days later, Rowe died, but Russell pressed on; they were joined by the Broadcasting Dynamics team, which had decided they did not have the money to pursue their own application.

[14] In Macon's television ratings, WGXA established itself as the second station, far behind the commanding audience shares that WMAZ held for news and entertainment programming but slightly ahead of WMGT (the renamed WCWB-TV).

In February 1995, Russell-Rowe—whose three owners, Russell and two other men, were all past retirement age—filed to sell the station to GOCOM Media of Charlotte, North Carolina, for $11.75 million.

The move was precipitated by two factors, both involving WPGA-TV's owner, Lowell Register: he disapproved of a change by ABC regarding the institution of affiliation fees, and he also decried what he felt was an increasingly risqué program offering from ABC, telling a reporter for The Macon Telegraph, "I had somebody tell me they're running a good bit of gay and lesbian stuff on it".

[30] The shift of ABC programming from WPGA-TV to the new WGXA-ABC subchannel led to a dispute between Cox Communications, the primary cable provider in Macon, and WPGA-TV over whether WPGA's channel 6 position belonged to WPGA-TV—as that station contended—or could be used for ABC programming—as Cox desired, in order to place the new WGXA subchannel on cable channel 6, and believed it could do under the terms of its contract with Register.

WPGA-TV won a temporary restraining order in late December to hold the position, leading to the ABC subchannel debuting on cable channel 16.

[32] (A final appeal by Register to the FCC ended when the commission found that WPGA's contract with Cox rendered it a station that elected retransmission consent.

[33]) On March 24, 2014, Frontier Radio Management reached a deal to sell WGXA to Sinclair Broadcast Group for $33 million;[34][35] the sale was completed on September 3, 2014.

[44] From 2010 to 2012, the station aired a morning radio-television simulcast with WMAC (940 AM), featuring the same people that had been producing a similar show for WPGA radio and television.

[45] In 2019, WGXA morning news anchor Rick Devens competed on the CBS reality show Survivor: Edge of Extinction.