by a group of managers who had recently left Argyle I after that company sold all of its stations to New World Communications, purchased the station. Then-sister station KITV (in Honolulu, Hawaii) was included in the sale. Tak's creditors sold the two TV stations for $91 million in 1995. Argyle II closed on WGRZ-TV in April of that year, followed by KITV two months later. WGRZ-TV nearly lost its NBC affiliation in 1994 when NBC's parent company, General Electric, announced plans to purchase King World Productions, the then-owner of CBS affiliate WIVB-TV (channel 4). Had it occurred, WIVB-TV would have become an NBC owned-and-operated station. However, the deal never materialized, and WIVB-TV was sold to the LIN TV Corporation after attempts to sell that station to Westinghouse Broadcasting, New World Communications, Tribune Broadcasting, Paramount Stations Group and the E. W. Scripps Company fell through; as a result, the Buffalo market was one of the few areas to not be affected by the affiliation switches that took place between late 1994 and late 1996. (Coincidentally, King World would eventually be acquired by CBS in 2000, who merged the company into CBS Television Distribution [now CBS Media Ventures] in 2007; CBS and Viacom had broken up at the time of King World's dissolution.) However, WGRZ did lose the local rights to the Buffalo Bills to WIVB-TV when the NFL returned to CBS in 1998 after the network acquired the rights to the American Football Conference package. That ended a 33-year run for Channel 2 as the Bills' unofficial hometown station. Presently, WGRZ airs Bills games when they are featured on NBC's Sunday Night Football. Gannett acquired WGRZ-TV and WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan from Argyle II in a 1996 swap deal that saw KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City and WLWT in Cincinnati being traded by Gannett to Argyle II. The deal was triggered by issues from cross-ownership rules related to Gannett's ownership of The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Niagara Gazette, as well as cross-ownership rules related to Gannett's 1995 acquisition of Multimedia Cablevision in the Oklahoma City market. In January 1997, seven months prior to Argyle II's merger with the broadcasting unit of the Hearst Corporation, the deal formed Hearst-Argyle Television (which Hearst now wholly owns under the name Hearst Television). WGRZ dropped the "-TV" suffix in 2009. In early October 2012, Gannett entered a dispute against Dish Network regarding compensation fees and