The WMT stations remained under Orion's ownership until 1981 when the company merged with Cosmos Broadcasting, a subsidiary of insurance and broadcasting conglomerate Liberty Corporation. However, the two companies owned more television stations than the FCC allowed at the time. As a condition of the sale, Cosmos had to sell WMT-TV and found a buyer in Guy Gannett Publishing of Portland, Maine. On October 29, 1981, the station changed its callsign to KGAN-TV (FCC rules at the time prohibited TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners from sharing the same call letters, hence the change; the "-TV" suffix would later be dropped on September 13, 1984). KGAN, along with most of Guy Gannett's broadcasting holdings, was purchased by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1999.