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Ian Punnett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Case Ian Punnett (born March 3, 1960 in Wilmette, Illinois) is an American radio broadcaster, who has appeared on national news programs for CNN. He is a former host of widely-syndicated Coast to Coast AM, created by Art Bell, where he hosted every Sunday night from April 2000 until December 2001 and then every Saturday night from June 2005 until January 2006 when he started hosting Coast to Coast Live also on Saturdays. His Coast to Coast audience has nicknamed him affectionately, "Church Boy" or the Ferret or Chad Bonesteel.
On January 21, 2006 Punnett announced that the original host, Art Bell, would be returning each Saturday and Sunday to broadcast the show. Punnett moved to Coast to Coast Live with Ian Punnett, a new, four hour program, on January 28, 2006. The new show occupies a slot (6 pm-10 pm PST/9 pm-1 am EST) where Coast to Coast AM had offered repeats of earlier shows for stations which carried the show earlier than the 1 am EST/10 pm PST live start time. As such, many existing Coast to Coast AM affiliates automatically carried the new program from its first night and in subsequent months several new affiliates have come on board. Currently, the affiliate count stands around 200. In his short time hosting Coast to Coast Live, Punnett has developed a loyal following of his own. He always opens the show with the "reminder" of 'hostile invading aliens' hovering just beyond earth's atmosphere to 'Eat the Canadians first', saying they are 'much tastier' than Americans.
Punnett graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was a former student editor of the Daily Illini. After college, under the pseudonym "Ian Case" (his first and middle names transposed), co-hosted rock morning radio shows on WXLP in the Quad Cities called "Ian Case and the Coach" and then "Ian Case and The Duke" with Mike "The Duke" Donegan on then-rock music station WKDF in Nashville, Tennessee in the early-to-mid-1990s. He went on to do talk radio for WGN in Chicago in 1994, then went to Atlanta, Georgia in 1997 to host a nightly talk show on WGST under his real name, Ian Punnett. He returned to the WKDF morning show in 1998, though he remained in Atlanta and broadcast the show from his home studio (while co-host Mike "Duke" Donegan broadcast from the station's Nashville studio). Punnett would occasionally slip up and announce his real name instead of the pseudonym, which inadvertently became a running gag. That show's run came to an end in early 1999, shortly before WKDF switched to a country music format.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Punnett hosts the morning show (5-9 am) on WFMP-FM. The show is known as A Balanced Breakfast with Ian and Margery, and is co-hosted by his wife, Margery C. Punnett who does her part of the show from a studio in their home while getting their two teenage boys off to school. Punnett has Masters of Divinity degree from Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, and is in the ordination process in The Episcopal Church. His wife. Margery C. Punnett, is a former TV producer who has worked for CNN as well as Oprah.