BOSTON -- The decision to audition Don Imus's ex-sidekick has created a stir of controversy and led WRKO radio to issue a statement clarifying his role.

Bernard McGuirk will appear live on WRKO-AM's "Finneran's Forum" next Wednesday through Friday, station officials said. He is the "Imus in the Morning" producer and on-air jester who took part in the exchange of racist banter that led to his and Imus' dismissal last month.

"There is no job offer, just a chance to be a guest host, period," George Regan, spokesman for Entercom Communications, told the Boston Globe. "They're looking at him as a potential cohost, but they're looking at a lot of people."

McGuirk will team up with former state House Speaker Tom Finneran, who was one of the most powerful lawmakers in Massachusetts until he resigned from the Legislature in 2004 amid a federal investigation.

Regan told the Globe that the appearance was not an audition, but said he could not rule out the possibility that McGuirk would be offered a job.

Finneran began his news and politics talk show in February and the show's ratings have been declining.

Finneran said he was looking forward to working with McGuirk.

"I'm determined to make sure the show is entertaining, and Bernard's record is pretty clear. He's a talented guy," Finneran said.

Offensive language will be off limits, Finneran said.

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog in Washington, D.C., told the Globe that the kind of bigotry that McGuirk regularly displayed on the Imus show should not be allowed back on the air.

"The Imus scandal led to a broad national conversation about gender and race in the media, and I think it's important we learn something from that," Frisch said.

In the April 4 on-air exchange, McGuirk first called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "hard-core hos." In response, Imus called the women "nappy-headed hos." Both were eventually fired from the nationally syndicated show, which combined political discussion and comic banter and also was televised on MSNBC.

Jason Wolfe, WRKO's vice president of AM programming and operations, called McGuirk "entertaining, very witty. That, in combination with the intelligence-slash-wit of Finneran, could be interesting."

"The past's the past. It's over. It does not take away from the fact that he's extremely talented," Wolfe said Friday. "He's going to be presenting himself in a very different way than he was on the other show, because on the other show his role was different."

WRKO, owned by Entercom Communications Corp., has dropped to ninth overall in the critical drive-time ratings for the January-March time slot this year, down from seventh last year, according to Arbitron. In November, host John DePetro and his engineer were fired after DePetro referred to a former Green/Rainbow gubernatorial candidate as "a fat lesbian."