Show Business: Friendly Sounds in the Dark

Styrofoam cups and cans of diet Coke are scattered across a desk dominated by a bulky radio microphone. A fleshy, pie-faced man in a short-sleeved shirt is idly dealing blackjack hands to himself while grappling with questions from his call-in radio audience. Mostly, the problems revolve around money: investments, insurance, loans, lawsuits. A man from Topeka who sells computer cables for a living wants to know how much liability coverage he should have. Bruce Williams replies, “I wouldn’t walk across the street with less than a mil. Juries are crazy.” A caller from Spokane wants advice on borrowing $2,000. Williams grabs a nearby booklet and tots up the interest on a three-year vs. a four-year loan. For a Seattle man, Williams becomes an instant expert on zoning codes; for a listener in Rochester, he’s an authority on inheritance taxes. And for a high school student who is uncertain about college, he is a sympathetic uncle: “Kinda overwhelming?” “Yeah.” “Let me tell ya somethin’. You’re just getting started on a great adventure.”

Nowhere but on radio could this mix of fast-fact glibness and folksy sentiment be so engaging. While Garrison Keillor entertains listeners with tales of his mythical Minnesota town, residents of real Lake Wobegons and metropolises across the country are happily cuddling up with a new array of nationwide radio personalities. These voices from the darkness offer advice, information, news and chat with the sort of one-on-one intimacy that slick, impersonal television cannot approach. “Radio personalities are not stars but friends,” says Sally Jessy Raphael, whose friends include nearly 2 million weekly listeners to her weeknight radio advice program. “You don’t know what Jane Pauley had for breakfast, but you know what I had. People regard their radio stations as an extended family.”

That radio continues to flourish more than three decades after it was supposedly doomed by television will come as a surprise only to those who confidently predict the demise of every old technology the minute a new one comes along. Although radio was forced into the background by TV during the 1950s, the medium did not die; it merely took on new forms. As TV became the nation’s main purveyor of mass entertainment, radio turned predominantly local and aimed to please smaller, more specific segments of the audience. The whole family might gather around the TV set at night, but people usually encountered radio in private moments–waking up in the morning, driving to work, getting ready for bed. Soon everyone from country-music fans to news junkies had a station to call his or her own.

Now another new technology is changing the face of radio. The advent of communications satellites has enabled programs to be distributed more easily and more cheaply than ever before. At least 23 national radio networks are currently in existence, compared with just four in 1968 and nine in 1974. Though music, news and sports constitute the bulk of network fare, the radio dial is increasingly filling up with daily, weekly or monthly “longform” programming, from music/variety series like NBC’s Live from the Hard Rock Café (with Host Paul Shaffer of TV’s Late Night with David Letterman) to national talk/call-in shows, many inspired by the phenomenal success of Mutual Radio’s seven-year-old Larry King Show.

AM stations in particular are attracted to network news and information programming as a way of distinguishing themselves from FM, which has captured the bulk of the music audience. Stations often find it both better and cheaper to put on a network show rather than hire a local personality, especially for nights, weekends and other lower-rated radio time slots. Audiences may not even know they are hearing a network broadcast because local phone numbers and recorded promos are sometimes used to maintain a local flavor.

National Public Radio too is rebounding following a financial crisis that necessitated major cutbacks two years ago. Many of the cuts have since been restored. NPR’s news and information shows, including the highly regarded Morning Edition and All Things Considered, increased their audience by 15% this year over last, and a new show, Weekend Edition, will be added on Saturday mornings, starting this week. In the meantime, NPR’s friendly rival, American Public Radio, has nearly doubled its total programming hours in the past year. (NPR and APR both supply programming to public radio stations; NPR is best known for news and public affairs, while APR distributes a variety of music and cultural fare, including A Prairie Home Companion.)

Despite years of second-class media citizenship, radio has never lost its fervent champions. “We take radio for granted, but it’s in our cars, our kitchens, our bedrooms,” says Charles Osgood, the CBS Sunday-night TV anchor who also does wry, and often rhyming, commentaries on CBS radio each weekday morning. “If someone told me I couldn’t do any more TV, I’d be unhappy. But if I had to choose, it would be radio.” Another stalwart of the medium, News Commentator Paul Harvey is a surviving link to an earlier era of network radio. On the air for more than 40 years, he is the most widely heard personality on radio, carried on some 1,100 stations. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the pixieish sex therapist, was launched to fame by a sex-advice show on New York radio and now also does a national call-in show for NBC, and a TV talk show on the Lifetime Cable Network. “Radio was crucial in giving me the opportunity to talk about sexual matters in an explicit way,” she says. “Not only the power of the medium, but the anonymity it provides.”

The anonymity often extends to the on air personalities as well. With an average weekly audience of 2,527,000, NBC’s Williams is the highest-rated radio talk-show host in America. Yet he could pass unrecognized on any city street, at least as long as he keeps his mouth shut. “Radio is an avocation, fun and games to me,” says Williams, 53, who has been involved in a range of entrepreneurial ventures, from insurance and real estate to a car-rental agency and a florist business. Asked eleven years ago to invest in a radio station, he decided instead to learn more about the business from the inside and began doing a local “ombudsman’s show” in New Jersey. After a stint at New York City’s WMCA, in 1981 he joined NBC’s newly created Talknet, a nightly package of talk shows now heard on 238 stations.

“My show is billed as finance, but to get it down to one word, I talk about life,” says Williams. “Radio is, at bottom, an entertainment medium, and if you lose sight of that, you’re not eating the right hamburgers. But I also regard what I do as a profound responsibility. I tell my listeners to wear seat belts, and one caller phoned in to say that it saved her friend’s life. That’s heavy-duty stuff.”

Sally Jessy Raphael, a 29-year veteran of the business, knows about heavy-duty stuff too. A few years ago a woman committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills while talking to Sally on the air. “Two minutes before the crew got there, she gave out,” Raphael recalls. “Things like that blow your mind and wrench me beyond belief.” A more typical batch of callers on a recent segment of her Dear Abby-style Talknet program had less cataclysmic troubles: a wife whose husband had lost interest in sex, a woman who wanted suggestions for a house gift for her daughter living in New York City, a man who did not want to ride in the back seat of his father-in-law’s truck on a trip to Florida. Raphael’s advice is heavily laced with reassuring bromides (“One of the hardest things in the world is to rebuild trust”) and sympathetic handwringing.

At 43, Raphael is married to her second husband, and between them they have eight children (one adopted, three foster). She readily admits that she has no psychological training for her over-the-air counseling, just an abundance of life experience and an upbeat message. “I’m a cheerleader of sorts, always positive,” says Raphael, who also is host of a nationally syndicated talk show on commercial TV, “telling people they can make it, that the world’s problems can be solved. But I never took Detachment 101, and I tend to get too emotionally involved. I care too much.”

Compared with Raphael and her middle-American effusiveness, British-born Michael Jackson is positively highbrow. Yet Jackson, who runs a weekday talk show on ABC Talkradio, can mix it up with the best of them. In 1980 Senator Ted Kennedy began a telephone interview by announcing to Jackson, “On behalf of my family and the people of America, we feel we owe a great debt to you and your brothers for your great contribution to American music.” Jackson (no relation, of course, to the rock star) replied, without missing a beat: “Sir, on behalf of my brothers and myself, I thank you. You are the Senator that had the charisma bypass, aren’t you?”

A slight, self-effacing native of London, Jackson, 51, launched his radio career in South Africa at age 16, and later became a popular all-night radio host in San Francisco. Now based in Los Angeles, Jackson welcomes an eclectic array of newsmakers, authors and celebrities to his lively gabfest, peppering them with polite but sometimes prickly questions. Yet Jackson is unfailingly gracious toward his call-in listeners. “My job is to provide hospitality,” he says. “You have to build a rapport, a bridge. People are not morons. If they have taken the trouble to call and to battle to get through, they have something to say and it is my job to help them say it.”

Newscasts rarely seek or offer that sort of audience rapport. But NPR’s popular All Things Considered is an exception. With its leisurely pace, mellow tone and literate, in-depth reporting, the late-afternoon newscast is not just the most informative news show on radio but also the friendliest. “The show is relaxed and informal,” says Susan Stamberg, who is co-host of the 90-minute program with Noah Adams. “We even ask the audience to send us story ideas. We do in the real world what Garrison Keillor does in the fantasy world.” A Manhattan native, Stamberg began as co-host on All Things Considered in 1972, after quitting a “boring” editorial assistant’s job at the New Republic magazine. “Here talents can flourish,” she says. “If things are going well on the show, you don’t have to stop for a commercial or because your 30 or 60 seconds are up.”

Such things are appreciated by the show’s loyal audience, which includes many movers and shakers in Washington as well as other journalists. CBS’s Charles Kuralt proclaims that All Things Considered “beats anything else on radio, television, shortwave, CB or ship-to-shore.” Others might nominate Morning Edition, NPR’s two-hour morning counterpart, anchored by Bob Edwards, at least a close second. The less than prime-time salaries for anchors (estimated $60,000) rankle a bit, admits Edwards, who came to NPR after leaving the Mutual Radio Network in 1973. “But it’s a trade-off; 50% of what I do here is my idea.”

Personal involvement seems to be radio’s special province, whether the product is news or advice. Says NPR President Douglas Bennet: “We have the kind of programs that keep people sitting in their cars after they have arrived at work or at home. With radio you can get your mind on the subject.” In the NPR office, a sign boasts: RADIO WILL BURY TELEVISION. The message might be a little brawny for the medium. But no one can deny that radio is alive and talking. –By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Hays Gorey/Washington