Channel 46 first went on the air on June 6,1971. It was originally owned by the Continental Broadcasting Network, an arm of Pat Robertson 's Christian Broadcasting Network.

Its original calls were WHAE-TV, which stood for " Heaven And Earth". Originally, the station only programmed for an eight-hour broadcast day. It also had a low-budget lineup consisting of a few hours of general entertainment and another few hours of religious shows per day. It ran only religious programming on Sundays.

By 1976, the station had expanded to a 20-hour broadcast day, airing cartoons, classic sitcoms, family dramas, westerns, and religious programming (including The 700 Club twice a day) on weekdays. Children's programming, westerns and movies were shown on Saturdays and the station continued to air strictly religious programming on Sundays until the fall of 1980. At that time, it began to run general entertainment programming during the afternoon.

In 1977, it changed calls to WANX, which stood for " A tlanta IN Christ ( X )." It also began offering more mainstream programming. However, it didn't air any programming that would offend fundamentalist / Pentecostal sensibilities.

The station was bought by Chicago -based Tribune Broadcasting in 1984. Tribune changed its call letters once again, this time to WGNX, named after then-sister station in Chicago WGN-TV : it took WGN , and added an X from the previous callsign (basically it was WGN + WANX ). The 700 Club was now only broadcast once a day, before being dropped altogether. The station continued to air a similar entertainment lineup with newer shows being added over the years, especially shows that it would not have aired under CBN ownership.

In 1989, WGNX started its first ever newscast, Channel 46 News at Ten , a seven-night-a-week, 10-11 p.m. newscast. When Tribune partnered with Time Warner to form the new WB Network , WGNX was slated to become the new network's Atlanta affiliate when that network launched in January 1995.

Those plans came to a halt on May 22, 1994, however.

On that day, New World Communications announced an affiliation agreement with the Fox Broadcasting Company , months after Fox won the broadcast rights to NFC football games. This resulted in most of its stations set to become Fox affiliates. One of the stations due to switch was Atlanta's longtime CBS affiliate, WAGA .

CBS needed to find a new affiliate, but neither WGNX nor Atlanta's original Fox affiliate, WATL , were interested at first. Fearing it would have no affiliate in Atlanta, CBS made a deal to buy WVEU, a low-rated station on channel 69 with the weakest signal of Atlanta's full-power stations in October 1994.

Around the same time that the WB launched, another new network, the United Paramount Network (UPN), co-owned by Paramount Pictures / Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries , was set to launch, and with all the other events going on, WATL would have most likely become the UPN affiliate for Atlanta.

However, CBS still wanted to affiliate with a station that people were more familiar with. For several months, it continued to negotiate with Tribune, who finally relented in November and allowed WGNX to become a CBS affiliate. This move left WGNX with cartoons and sitcoms that it would no longer have time to air as a CBS affiliate, so it sold some of its syndicated programming to WVEU, which became the UPN affiliate (while WATL joined the WB), and was later sold to Viacom, which changed its calls to WUPA.

As a CBS station, WGNX moved the 10 p.m. newscast to 11 p.m. and added newscasts at Noon (12 p.m.) and 6 p.m., as well as more syndicated talk and reality shows. Tribune began to manage the station in tandem with WATL in 1996 under a local marketing agreement.

In 1998, Tribune swapped WGNX to Meredith Corporation in a three-way deal which saw Tribune acquire KCPQ in Seattle from Kelly Broadcasting; that deal allowed Tribune to buy WATL outright the next year.

The station changed its calls to WGCL-TV in 2000 to reflect its new branding tagline, "We're Georgia's CLear TV ". It began calling itself "CBS Atlanta" again, then two years later readopted the "CBS46" moniker.