Political Effort to ‘Flood the Air’ : Radio Station Screens Calls on Insurance

KABC radio, which is airing a series of talk shows this week on the five insurance ballot initiatives, said Monday it is taking steps to keep the shows balanced after seeing an insurance industry letter asking its campaigners to “flood the air” with loaded questions during the programs.

“We’re screening calls, trying to circumvent their campaign that way,” said a spokesman for show host Michael Jackson.

On the first show Monday, featuring the chairman of the Proposition 100 campaign, which the insurance industry opposes, several questions appeared by their almost professional slant to have possibly been planted, but by both sides.

One person who asked a question corresponding to one of 34 questions suggested in the insurance industry letter was challenged by Jackson, but the man insisted that he was acting on his own. Later, another caller got in two questions that seemed heavily slanted against the industry’s position in the bitter initiative fight.

Letter Defended

A spokesman for the insurers’ campaign committee, Scott Carpenter, defended the letter sent out Sept. 2 by Marjorie M. Berte, a campaign employee, to what he would say only were “more than 100” supporters of Proposition 104, the industry’s no-fault initiative.

“It is normal campaign practice on all such shows to try to get your people to call in,” Carpenter said. “The (opposing) trial lawyers are doing the same thing, using the same tactic.”

A spokeswoman for the trial lawyers later denied the organization uses such tactics.

In another campaign development, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of California announced plans for each of their approximately 2,000 agent members to send at least two mailings to each of their clients before the Nov. 8 election. The letters would support two insurers’ initiatives, 104 and 106, and oppose two others, 100 and 103.

The organization’s executive vice president, Jerry O’Kane, said that millions of insurance policyholders could receive the letters, although he had no precise estimate of how many.

A major part of the industry’s announced $43-million campaign to pass its initiatives and defeat the others is the use of such mailings. The agents’ group said it has prepared a “grass-roots campaign kit” for each agent containing “all new sample client letters designed to fit on one page.”