A Florida man goes on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” He says his wife died of cancer because she used a cellular phone. There is no scientific study on the question. The cellular industry scoffs and declines to put a spokesman on the show. Big mistake. The lines light up. By last Friday-eight days after “King”-a share of stock in Motorola, Inc., the biggest maker of cellular phones, has dropped 20 percent. The federal government, at the industry’s urging, gears up to study the issue.
It’s two days before Bill Clinton’s Inauguration. On public radio in Washington, host Diane Rehm goes to the “open phones.” Much of her audience is, literally, inside the Beltway, people who might be sympathetic to Zoe Baird’s child-care problems. The lines light up. Opinion makers and politicos are listening. The verdict: Zoe’s got to go. “If that’s the feeling here,” Rehm muses, “what’s happening in Sioux City?” Washington begins to get the message. Three days later Baird withdraws.
On Tuesday the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin in the “Tank,” their Pentagon conference room. The topic: whether to allow avowed homosexuals in the military. The Chiefs are against it on military grounds. But they have other arguments. Top brass are not known for the common touch, but they tell the president: look at the polls, listen to the radio. Three days later Clinton moves far more cautiously than he had wanted, merely ordering the services to quit asking new recruits if they are gay.
Talk-show democracy changed politics in the presidential race last year, bringing candidates phone to phone with voters. With his vision of teledemocracy and his surprisingly strong showing in November, Ross Perot woke up the establishment to the voters’ anger. Now comes the next step: call-in government. Having tasted power, voter-callers want more; having risen through talk, Clinton is being rattled by it. “People want two-way talk,” says King. “They say, ‘We want to talk to our government!’” Americans can do it through the burgeoning phenomenon of call-in shows, led by King, Rush Limbaugh and Brian Lamb on C-Span, and mirrored locally by dozens of tart-tongued, influential hosts. These shows, in turn, generate tidal waves of switchboard-clogging calls and letters-to-your-congressman. Call-in government is a needed jolt to sclerotic Washington. But it also raises the specter of government by feverish plebiscite-an entertaining, manipulable and trivializing process that could eat away at the essence of representative democracy.
It’s probably inevitable. Call-in shows are a fast-growing format, accounting for nearly 1,000 of the nation’s 10,000 radio stations. “Larry King Live” is the highest-rated show on CNN. This week he switches his 15-year-old late-night radio call-in show to afternoon “drive time” on more than 300 stations, quadrupling his radio audience. Television networks, which experimented with call-in formats during the campaign, are studying ways to use them again. “You’re going to see a lot more call-in on the networks,” predicts King. “It’s hot and they know it.”
Technology and demographics are the agents of change. Cheap satellite time allows local hosts like Mike Siegel of Seattle to go national with ease. Many mobile-phone services now have special deals with call-in shows, enabling motorists to punch a single button to dial in. King’s new show will be carried live on United Airlines planes, most of them equipped with phones. Two decades ago baby boomers turned on, tuned in and dropped out of politics. Now, says Atlanta radio consultant Jon Sinton, they are tuning in again, abandoning rock for talk. Flying to the coast, or idling on a clogged freeway, they can get in touch using the same cellular technology King’s guest told them to worry about. “Now you can call Larry and get cancer at the same time,” jokes Sinton.
Politicians are getting with the program, literally. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo is a pioneer; he’s hosted a regular call-in show for years. Other local politicians are doing the same. At the Democratic National Committee, new chairman David Wilhelm is laying plans for Clinton and other administration officials to make themselves available for call-ins. If he needs any advice, he can ask Susan Estrich. A former Harvard law professor, she ran Michael Dukakis’s famously out-of-touch campaign in 1988. She left Cambridge, Mass., for Los Angeles, where she now teaches law-and hosts a call-in show. “Anybody who ever spent five minutes in radio,” she says, “could have told you that gays in the military would strike a chord.”
You could have learned the same lesson by watching C-Span. Though it is available in 58 million homes, its audience is rarely more than 2 million. But a new survey shows that an astounding 98 percent of its viewers voted in 1992, and the network provides instant feedback from them. During breaks in the Baird hearings, C-Spain’s Lamb fielded viewer calls in his deadpan manner. The voices grew angrier with each break-and they were being heard by the same Capitol insiders who were watching the hearings. “In the old days people would have had to wait for details on Baird,” says Lamb. “Now it’s in real time.”
The next layer of the call-in system is CNN. Increasingly the network is including viewer call-in segments in its news shows to complement King’s prime-time appearances. The network’s ratings rose sharply during the election year and stayed there. CNN’s newest star is White House communications director George Stephanopoulos, whose boyishly evasive briefings garner high daytime ratings. “He’s getting some of our highest numbers,” says a CNN official. CNN is likely to continue carrying Stephanopoulos-and wrap call-ins around him.
Until recently, and with the important exception of Ralph Nader, Democrats and their allies largely ignored the power of talk broadcasting. Conservatives have always understood and relied on it. While Franklin Roosevelt sold his New Deal in radio “fireside chats,” Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith developed their own vast audiences of naysayers. Long before he became president, Ronald Reagan sharpened his antigovernment message on the radio. Pat Buchanan honed his combative style as a call-in host in Washington. “The fact is that liberals feel empowered and conservatives don’t,” says Limbaugh.
If conservatives feel any sense of “empowerment” these days, it’s due in large part to Limbaugh. His show is the most listened-to in talk radio (15 million tune in each week on 560 stations). His best-selling book, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” has sold 2 million copies in hardback; his TV call-in show is fast approaching Letterman-Leno ratings, and a new newsletter has 170,000 subscribers. Only nominally a call-in affair, Limbaugh’s show offers group therapy for mostly white males who feel politically challenged and who would rather hear Rush’s voice than their own. But they react. In Sacramento, Calif, last week, a Democratic lawmaker banned Limbaugh’s show from the internal broadcasting system in the California capitol. Limbaugh, who began his broadcasting career in Sacramento, put the issue to his listeners. Within minutes, calls poured in. His show was back on the system that same day.
As famous as King, Limbaugh and Lamb have become, the roots and power of call-in democracy are local. Call-in shows first turned political in New York and Boston, cities in which arguing in public about politics-or anything else-is a way of life. The recent history of call-in clout begins with 35-year veteran Jerry Williams in Boston, who in 1989 teamed up with Ralph Nader and others to protest a congressional pay raise. They succeeded in delaying it six months. Williams, Siegel and others founded the National Association of Radio Talk Show hosts-a kind of Continental Congress of call-in government.
Talk-show hosts can get results-a d have been doing so for years before Rush Limbaugh arrived. In Seattle, Siegel took his microphone to a crack house and got it shut down. In Boston, Williams helped derail the state’s seat-belt law, the proposed location of a state prison and numerous legislative pay increases. In 1986, he got 2,000 people to show up on Beacon Hill in a snowstorm to decry a Dukakis tax increase. “It’s nothing new,” Williams says Limbaughs of the world. “It is they who have been asleep.”
With Nader in the lead, others outside the conservative movement are exploring the power of talk radio. National Public Radio has launched a successful call-in show, “Talk of the Nation.” It’s now heard on more than 70 stations, most in major markets. Jim Hightower, a feisty Democrat and former agriculture commissioner in Texas, is launching a national show he says will attack an establishment the right rarely touches: Wall Street and big corporations. He’s resisting pleas to turn the program into a call-in (“I don’t want to be chained to a studio”), but if he is going to be true to his populist roots, he may have no choice.
This may all be great broadcasting, but is it good government? Perot, who’s busy wiring his “town halls,” obviously thinks so. So do many of the 19 million Americans who voted for him. Conservatives think it’s grand-a more accurate reflection of grass-roots opinion than the evening news. Radio consultant Sinton agrees-even though he is advising Hightower and calls Limbaugh “Hitler Light.” “The grass roots are basically conservative,” says Sinton. “And our medium, radio, is much more representative of America than others.” Free expression is America’s secular religion. Tuning in-and calling in-is just a high-tech way of honoring it.
But it can be honored too much. What King calls the “hum” of talk radio can be misleading. Only the most devoted and outraged of listeners call-rarely more than 2 or 3 percent of an audience. Politicians who react slavishly can be deceived. “It’s a potential early-warning sign, like radar in Greenland,” says Democratic polltaker Harrison Hickman. “You don’t launch a strike based on that evidence alone.” And its effects can be oversold. “Talk shows didn’t get rid of Zoe Baird,” says Limbaugh. “She got rid of herself.”
The more troubling question is whether America needs a government of its angriest voices. “Only the people who feel most strongly call us,” says Rehm. “But they aren’t the only ones who vote.” Dial-in democracy is attracting the same forces of manipulation that prey on other levers of power; interest groups on the right and left have the technology and determination to patch themselves into the national conversation. The intensity, speed and entertainment value of talk radio has a downside in a society already plagued by long-lasting problems and a short attention span. Ratings count and boredom is the enemy. There’s enormous pressure to keep the “board lit” by moving to the next hot topic.
But it’s obvious how this controversy will come out. On CNN last week, “Crossfire” debated the pros and cons of dial-in democracy. The weekend shows discussed it. Rehm has scheduled a call-in show about … call-in shows. So all you need to do now is pick up the phone and give your opinion.
Do you have a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton?
60% Favorable 20% Unfavorable
Do you approve of Bill Clinton naming his wife to lead administration efforts to reform the country’s health-care system?
61% Approve 32% Disapprove
Will Hillary Clinton do a good job coming up with a health -care plan?
62% Yes 21% No
NEWSWEEK Poll, Jan. 28-29, 1993
NEWSWEEK POLL
Should homosexuals be able to serve in the armed forces?
CURRENT 53% Yes 42% No 11/92 48% Yes 44% No
Should the military temporarily stop asking about inductees’ sexual orientation while the now administration consults about changing policy on gays in the military?
44% Yes 48% No
NEWSWEEK Poll, Jan. 28-29, 1993
Ross Perot didn’t invent rule by phone, he merely tapped into a network that’s been giving millions of Americans someone to talk to for years. Last week the phone lines crackled with discussions about Bill Clinton, Zoe Baird and gay soldiers. But a survey of some leading chat shows reveals that there was still plenty of room for local news, gossip–and ego.
Los Angeles
Gang Violence
1,150,000
Liberal
Proposed license fee for L.A. hiking trails
Seattle
Gays in the military
800,000
“Pragmatist”
Seattle’s “politically correct” police chief, crack houses
New York
Haiti
1 million
Liberal
Double standards
Boston
Local water rates
250,000
“Pragmatic”
Big government, high taxes
Washington
Foreign-policy hot spots, gas taxes
8,520,000
Nonpartisan
Long-winded callers
New York
Clinton’s promises
15 million
Conservative
Liberals, “feminazis,” tree-hugging environmentalists
Washington
White House press access
(Not available)
“Completely neutral”
People who call more than once a month
Washington
Zoe Baird
100,000
Liberal
Callers who disregard women’s rights
Chicago
Mike Ditka, the Chicago Bears, the “Home Alone” family
500,000
Liberal
The recession
Dallas
Zoe Baird and gay soldiers
138,000
Conservative
Liberal media and big government
New York celebs Don Imus, Howard Stern and Bob Grant have mass appeal, attracting a million listeners a week each. Malin Salu, whose New York call-in show is in Spanish, and Washington African-American conservative Armstrong Williams wield influence in their communities. Veteran hosts Bob Hardy (St. Louis) and Brad Davis (Hartford) draw big audiences interested in consumer and community affairs.
