Case Ian Punnett (born March 3, 1960) is an American radio broadcaster, author, professor, and Episcopal deacon.
In the early to mid 1980s, Punnett hosted the WLRW morning show in his college town along with Val Wallace. Punnett co-hosted Ian and Margery with his wife on KTMY in Minneapolis-St. Paul and was the regular Saturday night host of the widely syndicated paranormal-themed Coast to Coast AM, created by Art Bell. On December 3, 2011, Punnett announced that due to increasingly acute tinnitus, he would temporarily step down as regular Saturday night host of Coast to Coast AM, being replaced by John B. Wells: effective January 2012, Punnett would host the show one Sunday per month. In July 2013, Punnett ended his radio hosting career in order to begin studies for a doctoral degree. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2017, he returned as an occasional guest host of Coast to Coast AM in 2018 and became a faculty member and chief operator of the campus radio station at Kansas State University.
Career
Punnett graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was a student columnist for the Daily Illini. After college, under the pseudonym "Ian Case" (his first and middle names transposed), he 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. In between his Quad Cities stints, Punnett was also morning man on WMJY in Long Branch, New Jersey.
Punnett went on to talk radio at 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, although 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 ended in early 1999, shortly before WKDF switched to a country music format.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, Punnett hosted the morning show (6-10 am) on KTMY-FM. It was known as Ian & Margery, and was co-hosted by his wife, Margery (a former TV producer who has worked for CNN as well as for The Oprah Winfrey Show) who did her part of the show from a studio in their home while getting their two teenage boys off to school. Punnett has a Master of Divinity degree from Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, a PhD from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and has been ordained a Deacon in the Episcopal Church. Since 1998, Punnett has intermittently hosted Coast to Coast AM.
On August 1, 2007, Punnett helped report the Minneapolis bridge collapse on CNN.
Coast to Coast AM
In 1998 Punnett began occasionally hosting Coast to Coast AM. In April 2000, Punnett became the regular Sunday-night host for Coast to Coast. He was the first person other than Art Bell to be "given" a night of the week in his or her name. In December, 2001, Punnett left Coast to Coast AM with Ian Punnett to do mornings in the Twin Cities for Hubbard Broadcasting and to concentrate on finishing seminary. His replacement for Sunday nights was George Noory who would eventually take over the entire show when Art Bell retired again a few years later. Although Punnett occasionally acted as a guest host, he did not rejoin Coast to Coast AM on a full-time basis until June 2005 when Art Bell, who had been doing the two weekend shifts again, announced that he wanted to host just one night a week in order to spend more time traveling with his wife, Ramona. Coast to Coast AM with Ian Punnett once again returned to the weekly line-up, this time on Saturdays.