The reason is a well known occupational hazard in radio – losing your hearing from wearing headphones. Over the years, as your hearing fades, you turn up the volume. The more you turn up the volume, the more the headphones destroy your hearing.
Ian does a morning show during the week and may still do Coast to Coast one night a month.
Punnett began doing the show for his own specific esoteric curiosities – as a host, I won’t miss him. There was no overall Coast-to-Coast AM supervision on topics to avoid untimely topic duplications. He seemed to have a growing mental tic of sanctimoniousness and never passed up an opportunity to sneer at the Roman Catholic Church. Shtick, by definition, gets old.
Punnett attended seminary school and is an ordained Episcopalian minister. THAT has been an ongoing problem with Punnett’s C2C show; he’s become closed-minded and argumentative with anyone who challenges his theology.
i.e. He won’t truly look at the esoterica of his own chosen religion, so you can’t really talk to him about precession, end of Piscean age (fish/Jesus) and 2012 marking end of Christian epoch, or Jesus being an allegory of Horus, sol, etc.
IMO, Coast-to-Coast began its downhill slide the night Noory took the reins and the broadcasts became the “Glynis, Hoagland, open lines” rotation. For years the site has been a billboard of 3 or 4 Noory “look at me” banners.
Now, the only host capable of doing a good show (a la Art Bell) is George Knapp, but he has a day gig… and Noory seems to hold an odd animosity towards Knapp. (Knapp has won many journalism awards and Emmys.)
It’ll be interesting to see who gets picked to host the C2C Saturday slot.
Is Punnett’s tinnitus from being in ‘the biz’, his age (he’s 51), or HAARP?
I don’t share your opinion about Knapp – in fact, I edited his profile on Wikipedia a long time ago when he first showed up on Coast To Coast and I didn’t know who he was.
Those Emmys are “Local Emmys” – the TV people from a market, get together for a party and choose one of their own mainly to buff up their resumes and make the party tax deductible for the station. I looked at the local Emmy web site and wasn’t able to even confirm that he had won the number of local Emmys he claimed or his other supposed awards. He seems capable of talking about only one topic – UFOs and alien abductions, and obsessed with it.
They did announce the replacement, but I didn’t have it in front of me on the iPhone. The replacement will be John B Wells, who does occasional fillin work on Coast to Coast.
Here is a TooYube video of Wells talking to Alex Jones. I chortled when Alex Jones was reading his biography cold and got to a big long word Alex didn’t know how to pronounce. Reading copy ahead of time so you aren’t caught flat footed is Radio 101 – but when you try to do too many hours in a day of “product”, you tend to take shortcuts like not doing adequate show preparation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXc1t6Z9WpQ
My speculation that he Ian is losing his hearing is mostly based on it being a pattern for people who have done radio for long periods of time (Rush Limbaugh, and Rose of Quinn & Rose come to mind). One of the things people in radio apparently learn fairly early on is to turn down the headset volume before you plug in your headset. The guy who used it last may be close to deaf and you’ll get blasted into deafness if you don’t reset the level first. This is a systemic problem in radio.
Tinnitis is also a common side effect of medication – aspirin is the most obvious candidate. I suspect the real reason though is his wife Margery would like a full time husband. When he does the Sunday night/Monday morning show from 1-4 AM (ET) and then has to show up at his day job by 7 am (6am CT), I don’t know how he can do that without having a bad sleeping pattern.
http://www.mytalk1071.com/shows/ianmargery
KTMY-FM is an odd station that really stands out in the “Which one of these things is not like the others” Sesame Street game. It was one of the first talk stations on FM – their target audience is clearly only women. Most similar attempts to do “Female talk radio” have failed miserably. Arbitron shows them as the #18 station in the Minneapolis / St Paul market according to radio-info.com’s list:
http://www.radio-info.com/markets/minneapolis-st-paul
A buddy of mine (media hound) surmises that Noory takes all the ‘good’ guests/topics, and leaves the scraps for Knapp… i.e. the tried and true (obligatory) UFOs.
With regard to tinnitus, there is another culprit in our midst: computer hard-drive whine, video monitor RF, and other low kHz auditory pollution from electronics.
With 4 computers running most of the day, sometimes my ears will ring for several hours after being exposed to the high-pitched frequencies of computer hardware.
Wow.
If anyone wants to launch a campaign to replace Rush Limbaugh with John B Wells, I’m on board.
Ian seemed like a nice guy, but he had bad habits of asking rambling questions and stepping on his guests’ answers when they finally got a chance to answer. I hope they find a good replacement. I haven’t been impressed by any of the guest hosts lately.
The host that’s even worse about that is Jim Bohannon. He feels this need to restate the caller’s question to the guest from his perspective then do the same to the guest’s response, and making sure we know his opinion of the answer. Frequently what he is doing is deflecting a difficult question away from the guest. A lot of the time he’ll just answer the question himself and then ask the guess “don’t you agree?”
I wish George was leaving, his nice guy floormat routine makes me scream at the radio, I wish he would ask some challenging questions so some of his guests would not ramble on in thier fantasy world. Ian was actually a smart guy, there are a lot of good people out there to replace him, I look forward to a fresh host. I miss Barb Simpson hope she come back for a stunt.
I liked listening to IP at first, but then I started to hear a very liberal commentator coming out of his mouth. Might as well listen to richard maddow, so
I stopped listening to his c2c pgm (c2c w/noory as well).
One time I tried to listen to that crap program IPdoes with his wife. puke…
I like Ian on the weekend C2C. Was sorry to hear he will be leaving his post. During the show the other night he talked of his tinnitus problem and gave his audience the closest sample of what he hears 24/7/365. I’d go insane if I had to listen to that all the time. He has to have incredible coping skills. Best of luck to him.
UFO talk radio is a great break from all the political talk I tune into. Knapp’s voice is sharp and keeps my attention. Always entertaining. Noory, on the other hand, can be the cause of some episodes of sleep paralysis. Seems to be lost on the subject matter sometimes. Someday the man will learn how to properly pronounce ‘Egypt’ and ‘UFO’. It’s not ‘Ee jupt” and it’s not ‘yoo uff oh’. There are others he mangles but those two stand out in my mind. —– Wartime yoo uff ohs tonight. Should be good!
I guess my take on the C2C hosts is more simple, when I listen to it, it’s really just for something to have in the background as I fall to sleep. There is something about George Noory’s voice that makes me drift right off to sleep. Not to say he’s boring, just that his voice just has the nice warm radio guy quality.
After midnight, ratings are not counted and the FCC rules allow you to turn off the transmitter until 6 AM. Other than keeping long haul truckers awake, putting normal people to sleep is the purpose of late night radio (and to cause them to wake up to your station when the clock radio goes off in the morning)