WMAZ-TV was originally owned by the Southeastern Broadcasting Company and took its calls from co-owned WMAZ radio (940 AM, now WMAC, and 99.1 FM, now WLXF at 105.5).

WMAZ-TV is the fourth-oldest television station in the state of Georgia and the oldest outside of Atlanta, beating WDAK-TV (now WTVM) in Columbus to the air by only one day.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded Southeastern Broadcasting a license to operate a television station on its second try; it had previously made an unsuccessful bid for the VHF channel 7 allocation one year earlier in 1952.

After the failure of WNEX-TV, WMAZ was the only commercial television station in the Macon market until September 1968, when WCWB-TV (channel 41, now WMGT-TV) signed on and took the NBC affiliation.

WMAZ-TV continued to carry select ABC programs (notably the soap opera General Hospital in the afternoons and Saturday NCAA football coverage in the fall) until WGXA (channel 24, now a dual Fox/ABC affiliate) started operations in April 1982.

With the release of the FCC's Sixth Report and Order in 1952, the Commission outlined a new allocation table for VHF licenses and opened up the UHF band.

The "2" networks became CBS and NBC, "+1" represented non-commercial educational (public television, usually affiliated with NET) stations, and "1/2" became ABC, which, as the smallest and weakest network then, usually wound up with the UHF allocation where no VHF allocation was available (or was relegated to secondary affiliations with the CBS and/or NBC stations).

When the FCC approved the merger in November 1995, it announced that WMAZ-TV, along with KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City and WLWT in Cincinnati, would have to be divested to comply with cross-ownership regulations.

[9] WMAZ-DT2, branded on-air as Central Georgia's CW, is the CW-affiliated second digital subchannel of WMAZ-TV, broadcasting in 720p high definition on channel 13.2.

On November 4, 2011, WMAZ moved production of its newscasts to the set used by its legal advice program Law Call, with the normal red and black newsroom/control room backdrop.

Three days later, on November 7, the station (via the Facebook page of then-morning anchor Stephanie Susskind) announced during its 5 p.m. newscast that it would be upgrading its news production to HD in the coming weeks.

On April 18, 2018, WMAZ dropped the Eyewitness name from the newscast's title that it had used since the early 1980s to coincide with the switch to the new Tegna standardized music and graphics package.