In 1986, the WKBW stations were broken up as a result of Capital Cities' purchase of the American Broadcasting Company. WKBW radio was sold to Price Communications, who subsequently changed the station's call letters to the current WWKB on January 3, mainly in order to keep the long-standing ""KB"" slogan (which was necessitated due to an FCC regulation in effect then that forbade TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners from sharing the same call letters; the former calls remained on now-former sister station WKBW-TV, which Capital Cities/ABC would sell to Queen City Broadcasting). In 1987, the station moved to a full service oldies format and on June 18, 1988, the station dropped live programming and switched to satellite-fed oldies. On March 6, 1989, WWKB flipped to business talk as part of the "Business Radio Network". It flipped to hot talk in 1993. WWKB aired J. R. Gach from WGR as the afternoon drive show and established syndicated hot talkers The Howard Stern Show (by this time now almost exclusively on the FM dial), G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Schlessinger, The Fabulous Sports Babe, Tom Leykis and (briefly, before Gach's arrival) Don and Mike. John Otto hosted a late night program in this era. Stern's and Gach's presence was not enough to revive KB's ratings in what was then a three way news-talk battle also involving market-leading WBEN and contender WGR, which would itself later switch to its current format of sports talk and play by play.