After successive owner Paramount Global sold the majority of its stake in The CW to Nexstar Media Group in 2022, WUPA disaffiliated from the network on September 1, 2023, reverting to independent status.

[3] BCG's majority owner, Atlanta attorney David Harris, was approached by backers of a California STV company whom he thought were merely seeking advice on how to build the station.

[4] The antenna atop the Peachtree Plaza Hotel from which channel 69 would radiate had been hoisted into place in mid-August, days before the license decision was publicized.

[12] However, a planned full launch on October 1 had to be scuttled because the station's broadcasts on channel 69—at the top of the TV band, 800 to 806 MHz—were interfering with two-way land mobile radio transmissions.

Further, the station had planned to fill daytime hours with programming from a business news service known as The Market Report, which ran into financial difficulties and was unable to start on time.

[7] The two-way radio dispute continued to loom large over every facet of WVEU's operations for several years, as the station subsisted on production contracts.

[16] In June 1983, the FCC ruled that the station could begin operating at 50 percent power before 7 p.m. if it paid an estimated $250,000 to relocate all of the land mobile users affected by interference.

[17] In February 1984, the FCC ordered the station to engage the users or pay them to relocate on penalty of losing the provisional program test authority under which WVEU had operated since 1981.

[17] The station brought the programming in-house in August 1984[21] before eventually canceling it altogether and replacing it with syndicated shows and reruns because, it learned, music videos were not very "salable" to advertisers.

[23] The station also made its first entry into the television sports market, airing what was to be a package of 30 Atlanta Hawks NBA games in the 1984–85 season, with John Sterling as the play-by-play announcer.

In a 1991 article by Prentis Rogers in The Atlanta Constitution, it was described as the city's "quicker picker-upper",[28] constantly airing shows that the local network affiliates passed on.

[38] Bill Carter of The New York Times called CBS's purchases of WVEU and WGPR-TV in Detroit "little more than acquisitions of broadcasting licenses" because the stations lacked the facilities and staff typical of network affiliates.

[39] For this reason, a CBS move to WVEU would have meant an unprecedented campaign to build up the station, including major expenses in promotion and starting a local news department.

When TBS converted from a superstation to a basic cable channel, it was forced to reduce the number of Atlanta Braves baseball games it telecast.

[55] On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation (which had been created as a result of the split of Viacom at the start of the year) announced that the two companies would shut down The WB and UPN and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW; the day of the announcement, it was revealed that 11 of CBS Corporation's 15 UPN affiliates, including WUPA, would become CW stations.

On May 5, 2023, CBS announced it would exercise that right and WUPA would cease airing the network's programming at the end of August, returning to independent status.

[61] On April 5, 2004, NBC affiliate WXIA-TV began producing a half-hour prime time newscast at 10 p.m. for WUPA titled UPN Atlanta News at Ten.

[70] In 2014, WUPA became the official television station of the Atlanta Falcons, gaining rights to its preseason games and introducing weekly programs dedicated to the team.

[73] In 2017, as part of a broadcasting deal with the city's new Major League Soccer franchise Atlanta United FC and Fox Sports Networks, WUPA began to air the team's overflow games.