During the day, it ran specialty programming from the Financial News Network, which was subsidized by its nighttime broadcast of Super TV, a subscription television service that operated in the Washington and Baltimore areas.

ABRY attempted to sell WNUV to Glencairn, Ltd.—a forerunner to Cunningham, owned by former Sinclair employee Edwin Edwards and the mother of the Smith children that controlled Sinclair—in 1993.

The deal was met with public scrutiny, and though it initially fell apart, ABRY signed an LMA directly with Sinclair in 1994 before transferring the license to Glencairn the next year.

The station aired a WBFF-produced early evening newscast from 1997 to 2005; for most of its history since Sinclair began programming channel 54, it has been used as a test bed for television transmission technologies.

[6] The latter group dropped out, leaving New-Vision uncontested for the channel and resulting in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granting the firm a construction permit in June 1979.

[12] The independent station aired syndicated reruns and the Financial News Network during the day leading into the subscription service Super TV at night and on weekend afternoons.

As early as January 1984, WNUV general manager Mark Salditch realized that Super TV likely was not going to be around much longer and began preparing the station for a future without subscription programming.

[18] For the 1984–85 television season, channel 54 overhauled its daytime schedule to be more typical for a general-entertainment independent, and the station launched a promotion campaign to make viewers aware that it offered more than subscription programming.

[19] One element of the revamped channel 54 was a series of "Pet of the Day" station IDs featuring the dogs, cats, and birds of regional viewers, an idea taken from KTZO in San Francisco.

[22] With Super TV no longer broadcasting, WNUV overhauled its evening programming and made aggressive moves in an effort to become what Salditch called "the Cadillac of independents".

[24] New-Vision sold WNUV to a company formed by Boston investors Andrew Banks and Royce Yudkoff in a deal announced in December 1988.

[28] ABRY also aimed to capitalize on WBFF's commitment to the expanding Fox network to case channel 54 as Baltimore's only true independent station.

[29] It launched a campaign allowing the public to vote on programs for its schedule,[30] a promotional tool successful enough that ABRY duplicated it in relaunching KSMO-TV in Kansas City in 1991.

[34] In August 1993, ABRY announced that it had sold two stations—WNUV and WVTV in Milwaukee, the latter of which it managed and held an option to buy—to Edwin "Eddie" Edwards, who already owned WPTT in Pittsburgh.

[39] The original application for Glencairn to purchase WNUV was withdrawn in April 1994, but ABRY continued to express interest in selling the station to Sinclair.

[41] With the LMA in place, Scripps ultimately decided that continued protest was pointless and dropped its objection to a revised version of the sale, leading to WNUV becoming a Glencairn property.

[46][47] The relationship between Sinclair and Glencairn received renewed attention in 1999, when the company sought to acquire more stations and the FCC detected contradictions in its financial representations.

[49] Sinclair filed to acquire WNUV outright from the company, renamed Cunningham Broadcasting, in 2002;[50] it attempted again in 2003, when it appeared that the FCC would remove a restriction only allowing new duopolies in markets with more than eight independent TV station owners (which Baltimore lacked).