Entertainment News

Finally! After the rigmarole Air America went through in Chicago, which has left Chicago without any notable progressive radio programming ever since, we’re finally getting some good news.

Chicago’s Newsweb Radio Group today said it will launch a new local radio station for “progressive talk” at 850 on the AM band.

WCPT, Chicago’s Progressive Talk, will begin broadcasting Thursday at 8 a.m. with programming that will include talk shows, news on the hour and traffic and weather reports. Among the personalities with shows to air on the station are Jerry Springer, Al Franken, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Ed Schultz. WCPT will also air a show called Morning Sedition.

[...]

Newsweb Radio Group, a division of Newsweb Corp., owns five AM and four FM stations in the Chicago area. Owned by entrepreneur Fred Eychaner, Newsweb also prints foreign-language and alternative newspapers, and in 2002 sold WPWR-TV/Channel 50 to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $425 million. Mr. Eychaner is a significant donor to Democratic causes, giving at least $1.1 million to groups working to defeat President Bush last fall.

Good man. Thanks, Mr. Eychaner!

And less locally, The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert is getting his own show:

If Comedy Central's Jon Stewart is the comic version of Peter Jennings or Brian Williams, Stephen Colbert promises to be the same for Bill O'Reilly and others like him. The Daily Show regular will star each night in The Colbert Report, likely starting in September. Comedy Central is revamping its schedule, recognizing that late-night programming is essentially prime time for its youthful audience.

"It's as if my character on The Daily Show got promoted," Colbert told The Associated Press.

He'll be a "very well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot, not unlike some people who have these shows in the real world," he said.

Besides lampooning O'Reilly, the king of the cable TV opinion shows, he's sending up people such as Sean Hannity, Joe Scarborough and Anderson Cooper, he said.

I’m going to miss Jon Stewart struggling to keep from totally cracking up at Stephen Colbert’s antics, but I’m definitely looking forward to The Colbert Report. If it’s half as funny as either The Daily Show or Colbert’s other venture with Amy Sedaris, Strangers With Candy, which made me laugh until my sides ached, then it will be brilliant.

Here’s another little funny but unrelated tidbit from the story on Colbert:

Comedy Central … will often have as many viewers at 4 a.m. as it does at 6 p.m., network researchers said.

Ha! Something tells me they’ve got the munchies.