CLEVELAND – Television talk show host Jerry Springer (search), an Ohio delegate to the Democratic National Convention (search), will double as a special correspondent for a television station.
"He's well-connected and as plugged-in as any anchor or reporter we could send," Steve Doerr, news director at Cleveland's WOIO-TV, said Tuesday. "We were looking for an unusual way to cover it, with an unusual person who could give it an unusual bent."
Doerr said Springer, a former television news anchor in Cincinnati, will report and comment on aspects of the convention that other reporters might not cover.
"I promise you it won't be boring," Springer said in a statement released by the station.
His volatile talk show is carried by WOIO's sister station, WUAB-TV.
Springer, a City Council member and mayor of Cincinnati in the 1970s, ran for governor in the early 1980s and campaigned across Ohio last year in an exploratory bid for the U.S. Senate.
The Ohio Democratic Party named him Democrat of the Year and made him an at-large delegate to the party's national convention in Boston later this month.