City Louisville, Kentucky Branding 970 The Answer First air date 1927 (as WFIW) | Broadcast area Louisville, Kentucky Frequency 970 kHz | |
 | ||
Slogan Intelligent. Conservative. | ||
WGTK 970 AM is a Talk radio formatted station in the Louisville, Kentucky metropolitan area. It is owned by Salem Media Group and similar to many Salem talk stations, it calls itself "970 AM The Answer."
On weekdays, WGTK runs the entire line up of Salem syndicated talk shows: Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt and Steve Deace. WGTK had aired a local midday show with former WHAS host Joe Elliott but that was discontinued in the Fall of 2015. WGTK is the radio home of Bellarmine University men's basketball.
In the 1990s, the call letters WGTK belonged to a now defunct Classic rock station in Middlebury, Vermont. When Salem acquired an FM station in the Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina radio market, it used the same call letters, with that station known as WGTK-FM since February 2013.
History
This station began as WFIW in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. In 1932, WFIW was bought by George Norton Jr., and its transmitter was moved to Louisville, with the call letters being changed to WAVE-AM.
WAVE-AM was the long-time radio sister of WAVE-TV (channel 3). For many years, it aired a full-service MOR format, which later shifted to oldies. In 1988, WAVE-AM was sold to Radio One (not related to the company that would eventually buy stations in the Louisville market in the late 1990s), which forced the radio station to change call letters to WAVG. In the Fall of 1989, the station dropped local programming and switched to a satellite-fed oldies format. On September 4, 1990, WAVG switched to an adult standards format. In 1991, WAVG was sold to Sunnyside Communications. On January 8, 1997, Sunnyside announced they would sell WAVG to Pulitzer, then-owners of WLKY-TV, who announced plans to flip the station to an all-news format, with AP News Radio programming and simulcasts of WLKY's newscasts. The changeover took place at Noon on June 16; at the same time, the WAVG call letters and standards format would move to 1450 AM, while 970 adopted the WLKY-AM call letters. In August 2000, Hearst-Argyle (which bought all of Pulitzer's broadcasting outlets the year before) sold the station to current owner Salem Communications, and flipped it to a news/talk format.
On January 5, 2015, WGTK rebranded as "970 The Answer".
On December 22, 2016, it was announced that Word Broadcasting Network, owner of ION Television affiliate WBNA and operator of non-commercial Contemporary Christian station WJIE-FM, would take over operations of WGTK and sister stations WFIA (AM) and WFIA-FM under a local marketing agreement, effective January 3, 2017.