The Gulf Crisis Dominates Talk Over Airwaves : Radio: The situation in the Middle East has become a hot topic almost overnight. Talk-show guests and listeners are jamming the dial with impassioned discussions.

From the heart-rending pleas of a soldier’s grandmother to the most strident rantings of an America-first anti-Semite, talk show lobbying and audio catharsis over the Gulf crisis dominated the airwaves last week and are expected to virtually monopolize talk radio and TV shows this week.

Today, all scheduled radio talk shows in the Los Angeles area are planning to talk about the Middle East situation. (See listing, Page 12.)

“I hope there’s not a war but, my God, it’s good for conversation!” said Michael Jackson, the dean of Los Angeles talk-show hosts.

During the last week, it seems that Jackson has heard from virtually everybody--from NBC correspondent Garrick Utley to Vice President Dan Quayle and dozens of pro and con voices in between. The KABC-AM (790) switchboard has been a Christmas tree all day, every day and the topic everyone wants to talk about is war in Iraq.

Jackson spent much of this weekend boning up on a local supervisorial race, but the 24-year veteran of KABC’s talk-show format said that he thought it was an exercise in preemption futility.

“Including the Vietnam War, I have never seen a subject preempt programming the way the Gulf crisis has,” he said. “I’m getting Congressmen calling me for a change instead of the other way around, simply because they want to get their views before the public.”

Satellite communication has changed everything, even the garden-variety talk show, Jackson said. Today, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., he will try to patch through to several English-speaking Iraqi college students in Baghdad.

“There will never be a war covered quite the same way that this one will be,” he said.

Down the dial at KFI-AM (640), war talk is just as intense. Afternoon drive-time talker Tom Leykis originates his show from the Hyatt Regency Hotel overlooking Capitol Hill, beginning today from 3 to 7 p.m., in response to the unprecedented interest in the Washington-Baghdad face-off. He’ll bring on Pentagon Papers activist Daniel Ellsberg, newly appointed California Republican Sen. John Seymour and both the Iraqi and Kuwaiti ambassadors as in-studio guests prior to fielding calls, but it’s the average American caller whom he expects to bring the most drama to his show.

“There was a long time when people didn’t want to talk about this,” Leykis said. “Honestly speaking, it was a great topic when Iraq first invaded Kuwait last August and continued to be a great topic when the troops first went to the Gulf. But around October and November, all the way through Christmas, a malaise set in. The Jan. 15 deadline was something that we’d reach at some remote future time.”

Before Christmas, each time Leykis brought up the Persian Gulf crisis, his phones went dead, he said. He got more response from the ongoing savings and loan crisis or whatever issue du jour happened to crop up on the morning front page. His biggest pre-Christmas ratings came during a discussion of open marriage, not Sadam Hussein.

“It has gone from very cold to very hot overnight,” he said. “Around the second of January, people were ready to deal with this and take it seriously.”

Leykis will host his show on C-SPAN as well as KFI during his regular afternoon time slot this week. The cable channel, which routinely specializes in bringing Congressional debate into the nation’s living rooms, has enjoyed “incredible” ratings since it began televising the war resolution debates in both houses last Wednesday, according to C-SPAN spokeswoman Rayne Pollock. More than 53 million households now get one or both C-SPAN channels, offering either Senate (C-SPAN II) or House (C-SPAN) proceedings.

During a national crisis, C-SPAN appears to have joined CNN as the video choice for instant information, but radio talk shows remain the most popular venue for catharsis, Pollock said.

“The word me has suddenly crept into these calls during the past two weeks,” said Peter Piper, who has produced Larry King’s nationally syndicated radio talk show for the last decade. “Before New Year’s it was this cold, analytical call, like ‘this Sadam Hussein shouldn’t have raised the Palestinian question when he went into Kuwait.’ Now, callers are telling Larry, ‘I don’t want my kid to go to war.’ ”

Five days before Christmas, King (whose show is heard locally over KFI (640) from 1 to 4 a.m.) did a special call-in program devoted strictly to the Gulf, Piper said. The tenor of the calls was predictable: vague comprehension as to why 450,000 U.S. troops were there in the first place to a yellow-ribbon-round-the-oak-tree sentimentality to “let’s kick ass,” according to Piper.

One call, from an Iowa grandmother, changed it all.

“She lost a son in Vietnam and she told Larry that now she was afraid she would lose a grandson in Saudi Arabia. There were tears in everybody’s eyes in the control room. Up to then, we’re talking about 7th Infantry Marine this and Desert Shield troop movement that. Suddenly, it’s the grandmother in Des Moines. Before it was just people who were related to somebody stationed in the Gulf who were calling in. Now, it’s touching everyone. People who live across the street or down the block are calling,” Piper said.

The overnight midnight-to-dawn time slot that KABC’s Ray Briem occupies often puts him in the unenviable position of hearing from the fringes: people who either want to impeach the President or maintain a “let’s-just-nuke-’em” philosophy. The host of the graveyard shift at KABC is admittedly hawkish and doesn’t mind sharing his conservative viewpoint with listeners. But even his generally hard-line insomniac audience tends to disagree with him, he said.

“We can’t just sit there and let Sadam Hussein sit on 50% of the world’s oil reserves and threaten his neighbors with nuclear blackmail,” he said. “You have to set a deadline. In a couple of years, this guy’s going to have medium-range missiles in line and it’s not going to be Israel or Saudi Arabia he’s threatening. He’s going to be challenging Europe.”

The most chilling trend in the calls he’s noticed in recent weeks, however, is the rising tide of anti-Semitism, Briem said.

“I’d say roughly 20% of the calls are anti-Semitic,” he said. “They’re using the Gulf crisis as an excuse to pound Israel. If we didn’t support Israel, there would be no crisis (they are saying). And those kind of calls are increasing.”

Briem’s late-evening counterpart, Ira Fistell, is reluctant to fan the anti-Semitic flames, but admits that the “blame Israel” mentality has risen in recent weeks among his listeners as well.

“You can’t ever judge what the general public is thinking from a talk show because you only get those who are inclined to call in the first place and even those calls are screened,” he said.

Today’s Talk Shows on Gulf Crisis

9 a.m.-1 p.m.--Michael Jackson: Jean Sasson, co-author of “The Rape of Kuwait” (11 a.m.-noon), KABC (790).

Noon-2 p.m.--George Putnam’s Talkback: “The Persian Gulf Crisis,” KIEV (870).

3-7 p.m.--Tom Leykis: “The Persian Gulf Crisis,” interviews live from Washington, KFI (640).

4-6 p.m.--Paul Wallach: Jean Sasson and Deborah Haid, authors of “The Rape of Kuwait” (4:30-5 p.m.), KIEV (870).

7-10 p.m.--Joe Crummey: “Parents Protesting Persian Gulf Policy” (7-8 p.m.), KFI (640).

7-10 p.m.--Tom Snyder: “Inside Kuwait” (7-8 p.m.), entertainer Danny Thomas (8-9 p.m.), KWNK (670).