TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/051589/05158900.023

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 8KB | 151 lines

RADIO, Page 88

Bugle Boys Of the Airwaves

Talk-show hosts stir up a storm of political action

By Richard Zoglin


    Not long after oil began spilling from the tanker Exxon Valdez
in Alaska, anger started welling up in Mike Siegel. From his base
in Seattle, Siegel launched a national anti-Exxon campaign:
distributing bumper stickers, organizing picket lines and traveling
to the company's New York City headquarters to dump 2,000 protest
letters on the president's desk.

    A phone call last December from consumer advocate Ralph Nader
spurred Jerry Williams of Boston to help organize a citizens'
revolt against the proposed 51% congressional pay raise. Among the
tactics: deluging members of Congress with tea bags as a reminder
of the Boston Tea Party.

    Tom Leykis of Los Angeles prefers more dramatic measures. When
singer Cat Stevens expressed support of the Ayatullah Khomeini's
death threat against author Salman Rushdie, Leykis donned a hard
hat and crushed a pile of Stevens' records with a steamroller.

    Who are these feisty activists? They span the political
spectrum from liberal to conservative, though most share a populist
sympathy for the little guy and a suspicion of Big Government and
Big Business. Like protesters of the 1960s, they have a flair for
attention-grabbing gestures. But much of their power derives from
a factor that distinguishes them from grass-roots activists of the
past.

    They're on the radio.

    Yes, folks, these are hosts of radio call-in shows. Such
programs, of course, have long served as a sort of national party
line, a place where average citizens can rant, in blissful
anonymity, about everything from the local baseball team's losing
streak to the Bush Administration's arms policy. The hosts are
often loud and abrasive, with an opinion for every issue and a
put-down for every adversary. But in the past few months, a clutch
of conversationalists has crossed the line from simply mouthing off
to orchestrating nationwide political protests.

    The defining event for these radio activists was the battle
early this year over the proposed congressional pay raise. Inspired
by outraged callers, a number of talk hosts initiated
letter-writing and phone-in campaigns, and kept in touch with each
other to exchange information and plot tactics. The radio campaign
was widely credited with helping scuttle the pay increase. Now
several of these hosts are leading the protests against Exxon's
slow cleanup of the Alaska oil spill, collecting cut-up Exxon
credit cards and advocating a company boycott. More such crusades
may be in the offing. Williams, of Boston's WRKO-AM, has invited
his fellow talk hosts to a convention in June. The aim, he says,
is to "see what we have in common and see if we can get together
on some issues."

    This new strain of talk radio, Nader maintains approvingly, "is
the working people's medium. There's no ticket of admission. You
only have to dial." Congressman Chester Atkins, a Massachusetts
Democrat who was a chief target of pay-raise opponents, gamely
praises the format as well. "Talk radio is in touch with the anger
and hostility and frustrations that people feel with respect to
government in their daily lives," he says.

    But the current radio activism also has elements of a Meet John
Doe nightmare. The hosts have unique access to large
constituencies, yet they often seem motivated as much by ratings
as by the public weal: political protest sells. In their
inflammatory zeal, moreover, they tend to offer simplistic,
emotionally satisfying remedies for complex problems. "It's a
desperate attempt to get ratings," says Michael Jackson, the
longtime ABC TalkRadio host. "Rather than tackling an issue from
many angles, (the activist hosts) would sooner be the little boys
with the bugles leading the charge."

    In defense, Mike Siegel of Seattle's KING-AM argues that "we
don't manipulate, coerce or control. We're just the means through
which the public is heard." Siegel, 44, is a relatively
well-credentialed member of the talk-show fraternity. A Brooklyn,
N.Y., native, he has a Ph.D. in speech communications, and began
doing radio talk shows while a college professor in Massachusetts.
In 1980 he moved to Miami's WNWS-AM, where his first big on-air
campaign helped defeat a proposed rate increase by Southern Bell
Telephone.

    Siegel, who is comparatively mild-mannered as talk hosts go,
joined KING last November. He has railed against local police for
laxity in the antidrug war and against Eastern Air Lines Chairman
Frank Lorenzo (he joined a picket line during the current Eastern
strike). Soon he hopes to stir passions over the savings and loan
bailout. "I'm not a Pied Piper," he says, "but I do believe in what
I do."

    So does Jerry Williams, 65, a cantankerous veteran of more than
30 years of talk shows and a fixture at WRKO in Boston since 1981.
A onetime liberal who now calls himself a populist, Williams often
had Malcolm X as a guest during the '60s; today he spends much of
his time inveighing against Governor Michael Dukakis. Before his
role in the pay-raise controversy, Williams' most notable on-air
campaign was against Massachusetts' mandatory seat-belt law: he
helped gather 40,000 signatures on a petition calling for a
referendum, which led to the law's repeal.

    Like Siegel, Williams downplays the power that radio talk hosts
wield. "All we did," he says of the anti-pay raise jihad, "was
direct passions and emotions to the right place." Not everyone
regards him so benignly. Columnist Tom Moroney of the suburban
Middlesex News has charged that Williams "does a disservice to the
political process" and claims that he isn't legally registered to
vote in Massachusetts. (Williams denies the charge; Moroney, he
counters, is "evil incarnate.")

    If Williams and Siegel are generals in the new radio army,
there are plenty of eager lieutenants vying for attention. Mark
Williams, who came to San Diego's XTRA-AM from Phoenix last July,
ticks off his on-air crusades with self-promotional relish. "In
Phoenix," he relates, "I killed an antiabortion bill in the house
by one vote, going on the air a couple of hours before and giving
out the phone numbers of undecided legislators. I also managed to
put together a spousal-rape law."

    Some of these on-air campaigns have drawn fire. When Leykis,
of KFI-AM in Los Angeles, announced plans for a public burning of
Cat Stevens records (fire-department objections forced him to
switch to a steamroller), fellow KFI talk host Geoff Edwards
denounced his tactics as "fascist" and refused to air his
promotional spots. Edwards lost his job as a result. "You've got
a lot of people with questionable credentials manipulating people's
emotions," he gripes. "A guy who was a rock-'n'-roll deejay last
week (might be) calling for the bombing of Iran.''

    Edwards is not alone in his concerns. Several talk hosts have
opted out of the Exxon boycott ("We felt that cutting up credit
cards hurts the local guys running the gas station," says Steve
Cochran, of Minneapolis' KDWB-FM). Others oppose efforts to
organize radio hosts nationwide. "All the bad it can do outweighs
the good it can do," says talk-show veteran Larry King. A number
of prominent talk hosts are staying away from the convention being
organized by Jerry Williams, and the management of New York City's
WABC-AM has forbidden its employees to attend. "We feel that
unifying talk-show hosts on any political topic is undue and unfair
concentration of media power," says program director John Mainelli.

    The activists pooh-pooh such fears. "Collectively and
individually, talk-show hosts have the fattest egos you'd ever want
to bump heads against," says Mark Williams. "So the likelihood of
them agreeing on a national agenda is minimal." If they do,
however, it might be time for listeners to follow an oft-repeated
bit of talk-show advice: Turn your radio down.


-- Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles and Leslie Whitaker/New York