At least in Milwaukee it is. We only got 3 hours of WN yesterday. The rest was all paid programming. They were doing paid programming from 9 to 5 but took over the early morning yesterday and doing the same thing today! Is this a WN problem, or a station problem? WN is not connected with a local news station in Milwaukee. Maybe they should? It seems WIWN is the black sheep in the family. It's not helping my trust toward WN. This was supposed to replace TWC???? Is WN 100% problem free on DTV? I wonder every time we have a problem in Milwaukee.
The station that airs WN's programming has, for whatever reason, chosen to air only 3 hours of WN and 21 hours of paid programming. Infomercials are pure profit for stations, so if it's a choice between weather programming from a never-heard-of station or infomercials, they're probably going to go with the infomercials.
Look at the network Ion, for example. Last time I checked (which admittedly wasn't particularly recently), most of their affiliates aired only the nationally-scheduled programming provided by the network, and the whole rest of the broadcast day was nothing but infomercials.