Bugle Boys Of the Airwaves

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.

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles and Leslie Whitaker/New York