Author Stephen King held a news conference on August 23 to announce that he’d hired former Green Party politico Pat LaMarche to co-host a new morning show on his “progressive” talk stations WZON (620 AM and 103.1 FM) in Bangor. 

According to WLBZ-TV, “The Pulse Morning Show” will premiere on September 12 and run from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. on weekdays. LaMarche will be joined on the air by Don Cookson, a former WABI-TV reporter and former spokesman for the Maine Secretary of State’s Office.

LaMarche is no stranger to radio, having hosted the morning show on Portland station WGAN (560 AM) until she was fired in 1997 after being arrested for drunk driving. She later worked for a couple of Augusta stations using the pseudonym “Genny Judge.” In between her radio work, she ran for governor twice without success and was the Green Party’s candidate for vice president in 2004. She also wrote a book on homelessness. She gave up writing a weekly column in the Bangor Daily News in July.

As for WZON, it needs all the help it can get. The two stations tied for fifteenth place in the spring Arbitron ratings for the Bangor metro market with an average quarter-hour share of just one apiece.

Al Diamon can be emailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.

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