COLUMN ONE : The Talk Is About New Media : Radio and TV call-in and interview shows are a hybrid of entertainment and journalism. By serving as a conduit for powerless people with gripes, they are playing a key role in presidential politics.

When Hillary Clinton irritated homemakers some weeks ago with her remark about not wanting to stay home and bake cookies, she didn’t try to repair the damage by giving an interview to Time magazine. She went on the Home Show on ABC.

When husband Bill Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign was in trouble in New York, most of his aides now believe he turned it around by doing drive time radio with shock jock Don Imus, and later that morning, daytime TV with Phil Donahue.

When Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. stunned the political wise men by winning Connecticut’s Democratic primary, some people thought his key move was spending hours on Michael Harrison’s radio show on WTIC in Hartford.

For anyone interested in sensing where this year’s presidential campaign is at, or where the candidates stand on issues, among the best places to find out may be Larry King on CNN or Charlie Rose on the Learning Channel or Carlotta Bradley on WILM radio in Wilmington.

The once slightly regarded talk shows and interview programs of radio and TV, the new hybrid media of American culture, are playing a powerful role in shaping who might be the next President.

In the process, the rise of the new media is exposing several problems about the reach and effectiveness of the supposedly more serious press.

A significant number of Americans now regard the traditional press--network news shows, major newspapers, magazines--as part of the elite Establishment from which they feel disconnected, disenfranchised, even resentful. The Establishment press, many analysts say, frames politics in language many Americans do not identify with and around issues they do not consider important.

In the new media, by contrast, Americans can have an immediate say--calling in to talk with candidates directly, to air their opinions, even criticize the host for questions they consider inappropriate.

Many traditional journalists are quick to dismiss these shows as more entertainment than tough-minded journalism. And it is true that, particularly on radio, many talk shows still engage in baiting and alienation.

But the universe of new media in recent years has expanded, and now often treats subjects at greater length and in simpler English than the so-called serious press. Nowhere else has Ross Perot, Patrick J. Buchanan, Bill Clinton or Jerry Brown had an hour on national television to themselves for answering questions and telling their stories.

The most obvious case is the apparent presidential candidacy of Texas billionaire Perot. It began on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” took root in the talk radio programs over the next few weeks and then flourished on David Frost and Donahue. But the phenomenon goes deeper than Perot’s alternative, non-party campaign.

“Today, if you do the full swing of radio and TV, you are going to reach 80% of the public in a week,” said talk show host King. “You could run a whole campaign on TV and move right to the public. . . . The Larry Kings and the Phil Donahues make citizens feel connected.”

The reach of these less Olympian forms of American media is nothing new.

Reagan’s Choice

In 1975, shortly after he left the governor’s office, Ronald Reagan had his choice of two offers to start doing news commentaries.

One was to alternate with Eric Severeid on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The other was with Mutual radio.

Reagan chose radio, explaining to his media adviser Michael K. Deaver that he thought the medium was a better way to reach people because it had more credibility with many Americans than the network news.

“In my opinion, Ronald Reagan got elected because he was on the radio everyday for nearly five years talking to 50 million people a week,” Deaver recalls.

In the 17 years since, the growth of this hybrid media has entered a new age. In the last 10 years, the number of radio stations devoted entirely to talk radio, for instance, has tripled to 600, and that does not include the number of all news and music stations that now include talk shows, according to statistics from the National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts.

Part of the explanation is technology. With the development of cable TV, as well as a proliferation in radio and television licenses under Reagan-era deregulation, the audience that once belonged to the so-called traditional press has been divided across an expanding spectrum.

“When the old press was overrun or eclipsed by technology, it lost its role as the mass medium,” said Jim Squires, the former editor of the Chicago Tribune and now a spokesman for Perot.

But other factors also are at work, say analysts such as William B. Greider of Rolling Stone. In his new book, “Who Will Tell the People, The Breakdown of American Democracy,” Greider argues that the so-called serious journalistic institutions over the last two decades have “gravitated toward elite interests and converged with those powerful few who already dominate politics.”

Journalists became celebrities written about in society columns, or pictured on talk shows like CNN’s “Capitol Gang,” talking as co-equal insiders alongside politicians, whom they address by first name.

In the process, “the press has lost (some of its) viable connections to its own readers and grown more distant from them,” Greider says.

Presidential historian James David Barber argues that “there is more and more evidence that people don’t know the political vocabulary that newspapers and TV news are using. There is a kind of complexification that comes across.”

Another problem, says Murray Leven, the author of “Talk Radio and the American Dream,” is that “if you take a look at a program like Ted Koppel (of ‘Nightline’), the people who appear are all men of power, and the ideological and cultural framework within which these discussions take place is narrow.”

The Numbers Game

Average citizens rarely appear on such programs. Since 1972, for instance, research by University of San Diego researcher Daniel Hallin found that fewer everyday citizens have shown up in political stories on network television. That coincides with when the media began using polling to track public opinion. The public, in a sense, became statistical percentiles responding to the press’s inquiries, argues Jay Rosen of New York University.

This was roughly the same time that the new media began emerging. A hybrid of entertainment and journalism, public affairs and primal scream, talk radio became a conduit for powerless people with gripes to get attention, Leven said. These formats basically were transferred to television in the mid-1980s with such programs as Oprah Winfrey--and literally from radio to television in the case of Larry King.

“Larry King and Donahue and talk radio and even Rush Limbaugh are interactive media,” said Reagan media adviser Deaver. “There is a way to get in. You can say your piece and vote. In network TV, just like party politics, people are disenfranchised.”

A turning point so far in Clinton’s presidential candidacy may have come when he appeared on Donahue before the New York primary. Clinton underwent nearly 30 minutes of inquiries from Donahue about smoking marijuana and adultery.

Angrily, a woman rose and leveled a sharp criticism at Donahue: “Given the pathetic state of most of the United States at this point . . . I can’t believe you spent half an hour of air time attacking this man’s character. I’m not even a Bill Clinton supporter, but I think this is ridiculous.”

At ABC’s “World News Tonight” in New York, producers saw the exchange as a moment when the public had broken through into the process. They put the tape on the news that evening.

“The entire country is angry, you have got the most contentious primary election in years and suddenly these guys are beginning to think we have got to get . . . our message out anyway we can,” Donahue said. “I think that is a good thing. I think they ought to go on the ‘Tonight Show,’ ‘Arsenio Hall.’ You don’t have to bring the house down. But it will be instructive. It will be revealing to see how they adjust.”

Bridging the Gap

By being interactive, the shows at times can become bridges between disparate groups. Last week Michael Jackson took his KABC radio show to various Los Angeles schools to talk with students about the riots. At one point, after a junior high student criticized the police, an LAPD officer called in to respond, touching off an illuminating give-and-take that traditional media would be hard pressed to duplicate.

For years, many of the radio talk show hosts depicted issues as melodramatic clashes of good and evil, reducing problems to caricature and preying on fear to increase alienation, Leven says.

That still in many ways characterizes some of the most notable talk show hosts, including the nation’s most popular, conservative critic Limbaugh, whose program reaches 11.6 million people a week for three hours a day.

But as the media spectrum has grown in recent years, talk show host Michael Harrison says the talk show universe has become widened to include more moderate voices with various ideologies, from Michael Jackson in Los Angeles to Mary Beal on KNSS radio in Wichita, Kan., president of the association of talk show hosts. With them, the kind of people who listen to talk radio also has widened, and so has the range of guests and influence of the programs.

These shows may even treat issues more openly than the supposedly objective press in part because they have the luxury of time and more freedom of approach, contends Harrison, the editor of a talk radio trade magazine called Talkers.

“The Establishment media would never cover someone who they think is brilliant if they don’t think he can win,” Harrison said. Harrison points out that Perot did not begin receiving much attention from the mainstream press until after polls showed him threatening Clinton and Bush.

The new media are not going to investigate or unearth new information about a candidate’s background or record. They generally do not involve reporting.

But, ironically, politicians may find it more difficult to dodge questions from a talk show host than those from a supposedly more adversarial journalist, whom many politicians now use as foils.

“You are on with the average guy,” said King, “and if Bush goes on these shows, which he will have to, he is going to have to answer questions. The public expects it. They expect honesty.”

Accent on Involvement

Perot’s candidacy is full of stories of the new media’s role. Journalist Joe Klein, writing in New York magazine, tells how the North Carolina state chairman of Perot’s petition drive, electronics supply company executive Marty Henderson, was listening to a radio talk show in Charlotte one Saturday when he heard there was a Perot meeting in a local park. He went, and since he had met Perot, he was elected by the volunteers there as the state chairman. Now he finds himself, for the first time in his life, involved in politics.

The Texas billionaire first appeared on the King program during the congressional debate on the eve of the Gulf War in January, 1990, when he talked about his opposition. During the program, Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher called in to argue with the billionaire, a sign of the program’s interactive immediacy.

Afterward, King producer Tamara Haddad said, the King program received more phone calls than ever before in its history.

At the time of Bush’s State of the Union address in late January, Haddad said, she got Perot to agree to appear to talk about the presidential campaign sometime after the New Hampshire primary.

Although nothing was arranged, “he made very clear that he thought it was time for someone to take the reins and get the country moving, economically,” Haddad said. “My gut feeling was he was an unannounced player.”

Perot appeared, and said he would run if volunteers put him on the ballot in all 50 states. Again, the King program set a record for calls. In the days that followed, trade newsletter editor and talk show host Harrison said the community of talk show hosts around the country rode explosive interest in Perot.

What political impact the new media may have beyond that is unclear.

Timothy J. Russert, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” argues that a candidate could not conduct a campaign entirely on what he calls “the counter-elite” media. “When you cross the bridge into being a potential President, people want to know what your specific ideas are,” he said.

But, Russert said, it is a mistake to dismiss the new media as merely soft and easy to manipulate or based simply on protest and alienation.

In the new media, “people are basically communicating themselves, their personalities, their ability to think and talk and speak on their feet,” Russert said.

And in the end, that is a good deal of what Americans want to know.