Sale to Sinclair Broadcast Group/Howard Stirk Holdings era (2012–present)
On July 19, 2012, Newport announced the sale of WLYH's LMA partner, WHP-TV, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The LMA with WLYH was included in the deal, and Sinclair also obtained an option to purchase the station's license from Nexstar.[15] This purchase option would later be terminated on March 20, 2014, as part of a restructuring of Sinclair's purchase of the broadcast holdings of Allbritton Communications, including ABC affiliate WHTM-TV, to address ownership conflicts between the three stations. Under the original deal, Sinclair would have retained the higher-rated WHTM and traded the license assets of WHP-TV to Deerfield Media, though Sinclair would have retained control of WHP-TV under shared services and joint sales agreements. The license assets of WLYH would have been reassigned to Howard Stirk Holdings, a holding company controlled by Graham Williams Group CEO and conservative political commentator Armstrong Williams, should the option be exercised. However, the FCC ruled that this would have effectively created a new LMA between WHTM and WLYH even though the FCC had ruled in 1999 that such agreements made after November 5, 1996, covering more than 15% of the broadcast day would count toward the ownership limits for the brokering station's owner.[16] Under the restructured agreement, Sinclair announced that it would terminate the sale of WHP-TV to Deerfield and instead sell it to another third-party buyer, with whom Sinclair would not enter into any operational or financial agreements and would be given the rights to the LMA with WLYH.[17][18] Sinclair ultimately retained WHP and the WLYH LMA and sold WHTM to Media General. Sinclair closed on the Newport group deal on December 3, 2012. Howard Stirk Holdings revealed in its January 2015 application to purchase Las Vegas station KVMY that it again planned to acquire the WLYH license from Nexstar.[19] The sale was completed on November 12, 2015.[20] The time brokerage agreement between WLYH and WHP-TV expired on December 31, 2015; Nexstar had, on December 11, 2014, elected to not renew the agreement.[21][22] To reflect its new ownership, the station changed its callsign to WXBU on March 11, 2016.[23] The call letters correspond to the initials of Xavier B. Underwood, a member of the Williams family who also acts as creative director for Howard Stirk Holdings.[24]
In May 2024, WXBU became a Univision affiliate.[25]
