Anaheim Station Had Concentrated on Christian Broadcasting : KORG, Once KPZE, Focuses on Talk, Business News and Self-Help

Is the county that gave Wally George to the world of broadcasting ready for an outspoken radio talk-show host who is pro-choice on abortion, supportive of sex education in the schools and strongly in favor of gay rights?

KORG/1190 AM in Anaheim, which traded in its old call letters (KPZE) and format (Christian) in February, thinks so. Calling itself K-Orange, the station is betting on broadcasters like Karen Tyndall to sell its changeover to locally focused talk, business news and self-help.

A 32-year-old who spent the last two years as a talk show host at KIEV-AM in Los Angeles, Tyndall is holding down KORG’s 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. time slot Mondays through Fridays. “I’m for the underdog,” she said after a recent show that dealt with the quality of life for black residents of Orange County. “I guess I just can’t help it.”

Tyndall, who was raised in Downey and Los Alamitos, doesn’t concentrate her shows exclusively on social and political issues. Nor does she limit her guests to those she agrees with. “My show is a spectrum of life,” she said. “There isn’t any issue that I don’t talk about,” everything from phony psychologists and private investigators to penile implants and the “suit slasher” who has been hitting Orange County department stores.

She uses no tape delay in taking calls--the broadcast equivalent of a circus high-wire act working without a net.

In addition to Tyndall, KORG now features a husband and wife team, Bob and Yvonne Turnbull, from 6 to 9 a.m. The couple, both of whom have backgrounds in religious broadcasting, offer a low-key, upbeat magazine format mixing conversation, interviews, news, weather and traffic. They have regular phone-in consultations with separate specialists in indoor and outdoor plants.

“We’re not Sam and Susie Slick,” said Turnbull, who had a career in movies and television before switching over to broadcasting. “I wasn’t a household name, or you would have heard of me,” he said, reeling off some of the parts he played, including the student body president in “The Absent Minded Professor” with Fred MacMurray.

Despite their backgrounds (both worked recently for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network), Turnbull said the couple do not inject their beliefs into the program.

The station shifted away from religious broadcasting, according to general manager Bill Gudelman, partly because of the televangelism scandals of the last two years and partly because the Los Angeles market was already crowded with Christian stations.

With no radio outlet serving the news and business needs of Orange County, Gudelman said, management decided to focus the 10,000-watt station as much as possible on the local community.

“Everything we try to generate from here has a local flavor to it,” Gudelman said.

Traffic reports concentrate on the northbound flow in the morning and southbound in the afternoon, and traveling through the county at midday, he said. Orange County news, reported by Debora Simon, follows CNN world and national news at the top of the hour. The station carries live broadcasts of the UC Irvine basketball team and two sports talk shows daily, which frequently deal with county teams and athletes.

Gudelman acknowledges that the shift to “Orange County’s own talk radio station”--as newspaper ads call it--is far from complete. Only a third of the station’s current programming is produced by KORG. Another third comes from two national satellite services, the Business Radio Network and Sun Network of Tampa.

The remainder is “brokered,” or sold directly to individuals who then try to find sponsors or who use the programs to promote their own services. These shows range from “Money With Laura Tarbox,” of Tarbox Equity in Costa Mesa, to “Lighter Life Styles” hosted by Susan Magrann, director of the Obesity Risk Management Program at Anaheim Memorial Hospital, and Irma Grime, a licensed psychotherapist in Santa Ana. Time is still sold to a few religious broadcasters on weekends.

Newport Beach attorney Kenneth A. Satin began at the station a year ago with a weekly, half-hour program that he referred to as a “glorified commercial” for his personal-injury practice. But six weeks ago, he went daily with a morning show called “Impact” that, he said, deals with “legally oriented topics that we think would be of general interest” and brings together guests on opposite sides of such controversial issues as abortion and insurance reform. Satin and his guests also field questions and comments from listeners.

One reason the shift to local talk has taken so long, Gudelman said, is economics. “Talk radio can be extremely expensive,” he said, especially when it comes to hiring established personalties.

Since the station does not subscribe to Arbitron, the ratings results are not known.