WZTV
On December 6, 2017, it was reported that Sinclair and Fox were working on a deal that would see its Fox affiliates renew their affiliation agreement in exchange for Sinclair selling some of its Fox affiliates directly to Fox Television Stations. The deal would have seen between six and ten Fox affiliates owned by Sinclair and Tribune (all in markets with an NFL team) become Fox owned-and-operated stations. It was not known if WZTV will be one of the stations sold, although the stations being sold to Fox were expected to be from Tribune Media (notably KCPQ in Seattle, where Sinclair already owns KOMO-TV), many of which were previously owned by Fox. On May 9, 2018, Sinclair announced that seven Fox affiliates would be sold to FTS, but WZTV was not included and an affiliation renewal was announced for that station instead, keeping WZTV with Sinclair.
WFOX-TV
In 1989, Malrite sold the station to the San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), which had earlier purchased the first independent station in the nearby Pensacola/Mobile, Alabama market, WPMI-TV (now an NBC affiliate) and was the first television station that Clear Channel ever owned. As was the trend for many Fox affiliates throughout the mid to late 1990s, WAWS began shifting its programming toward talk and reality shows and decreased its reliance on classic sitcoms. In 1995, Clear Channel began managing channel 47—later to become WNFT—under a local marketing agreement; the two stations pooled programming and resources, while running the strongest syndicated programs on WAWS. Clear Channel purchased channel 47, which by that point had become UPN affiliate WTEV-TV, outright in 2000, creating the second television duopoly in the Jacksonville market.
After WTEV took the CBS affiliation from longtime affiliate WJXT (channel 4), which dropped the network after it demanded that Post-Newsweek Stations reverse compensate CBS to carry its programming and run the entire network schedule in pattern—only allowing pre-emptions for extended local breaking news and severe weather coverage, WAWS took over the local rights to the UPN affiliation on July 15, 2002, airing the network's evening programming on a secondary basis each weeknight from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. following the station's prime time newscast, as well as its children's program block "Disney's One Too", which it aired on Sunday through Friday mornings in addition to its existing carriage of Fox's competing children's block, FoxBox (later known as 4Kids TV), on Saturdays. It also acquired several syndicated sitcoms that WTEV no longer had room to carry on its schedule. The shift made Jacksonville one of the only television markets in the United States where all six major broadcast networks at the time (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN and The WB) collectively held affiliations with only five stations in a six-station market (which remains the case with UPN and The WB's successors The CW and MyNetworkTV in the present day) and the only market in which each of the Big Four network affiliates are controlled by two companies (at the time, the Gannett Company owned NBC affiliate WTLV (channel 12) and ABC affiliate WJXX (channel 25), both of which are now owned by its broadcasting and digital media spin-off Tegna, Inc.).