TV Anchor Finds a Voice on Radio : Radio: As host of the monthlong series ‘Which Way, L.A.?’ on KCRW, Warren Olney looks at underlying causes of the Los Angeles riots.

It’s a little strange hearing Warren Olney’s resonant baritone booming from the car radio. After 22 years on the air here as a TV reporter and anchor, his is one of the most recognizable voices this side of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and to hear it disembodied from his familiar spectacles, graying hair and anchorman suits makes one stop and look around for a phantom TV.

But commercial television can’t--or, more accurately won’t , Olney said--provide him or anyone else with the kind of thoughtful forum required to explore and understand the social, economic and political problems that gave birth to the worst upheaval in Los Angeles history. Radio did.

“Which Way, L.A.?,” a monthlong series airing on KCRW-FM (89.9) each weekday this month at 2 p.m., endeavors to examine the underlying causes of the violence, looting and arson that dominated the news for so many days last month. With Olney serving as anchor, the series seeks opinions--often from minority voices rarely heard on commercial broadcast media--about where the city should go from here.

“My sense is that it’s back to business as usual in local television, and that tends to be the freeway chase going on right now--even though we’ve seen it 20,000 times before. That is one of the reasons I felt so frustrated and thought maybe there was a better way to spend my time,” said Olney, who quit his job at KCOP-TV Channel 13 in December.

Now, with the perspective of six months away, he says the follies of television are more apparent than when he decided to throw in his well-worn towel.

“It’s not surprising to me that television has not offered much in the aftermath of the disturbances,” he said, “because the kinds of issues that arise from something like this are difficult to deal with. And, given that the news managements are wedded to their current formats, where you’re always moving on to the next hot issue, they just can’t deal with the complexity. And I don’t think they want to. It takes time and resources to go to a lot of places and talk to a lot of people, and these are not the kinds of stories that lend themselves to standing on the corner and wrapping it all up in 15 neat seconds. So all of this just about guarantees a sort of superficial treatment of things.”

Olney--a fourth-generation Californian whose great-grandfather was mayor of Oakland, whose grandfather was on the state Supreme Court and whose father worked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren--began his broadcasting career in Sacramento in 1966. When Ronald Reagan became governor in 1967, many local TV stations decided they needed their own bureau in Sacramento, and Olney served as Sacramento reporter for the NBC station in San Francisco. After a stint for NBC in Washington, Olney took a job as Sacramento bureau chief for KNXT Channel 2 (now KCBS) in 1970, before relocating here two years later as political editor and weekend anchor.

Over the years, Olney was regarded as one of the most respected reporters in town as he jumped to KNBC-TV Channel 4, then KABC-TV Channel 7, then back to Channel 2 and eventually--so he could anchor a daily newscast--to Channel 13 in 1989. After two years there, during which he was replaced as anchor, Olney called it quits, partly as a result of simple “burnout” after 25 years, he said, and partly in disgust over the blatant superficiality into which much of local TV news had descended.

In his six months of retirement, Olney said, he’s enjoyed writing at home--he’s working on a series for the Village Voice--producing and appearing in environmentally themed videos and giving speeches to various groups. Not for a minute has he missed the daily TV beat, he said, except during the traumatic unrest of April and May. “That was the first time that I felt frustrated that I wasn’t on the air,” Olney said. “I have always thought that the most challenging thing about Los Angeles was its multiethnic quality and that the most dangerous and intractable problem we faced as a result is racism. I had been part of the public debate in the community for a long time, and for something this significant to be happening and not to be involved did make me wonder if I had done the right thing.”

Ruth Hirschman, KCRW’s general manager, asked Olney to host a call-in radio show that aired a few days after the violence subsided. He handled it so well, Hirschman said, that she hired him to anchor the “Which Way, L.A.?” series--a commitment of time and resources that she said she felt an obligation to provide, especially since the station had been criticized by some media observers for covering international crises while ignoring much of what was happening locally.

“It came to me one night that we can’t do the job we did on the Gulf War and the Soviet coup (when KCRW preempted its regular schedule for weeks to report on and analyze critical events on the other side of the globe), and then not respond to the story down the street,” said Hirschman, who added that international stories are nonetheless “more my cup of tea.”

Hirschman said that she does not expect the program to offer specific solutions, but to allow people of different races and beliefs to talk and listen to each other. So far the show has addressed such topics as the proliferation of guns, rap music, the impact of Chief Daryl F. Gates on the Los Angeles Police Department and the viability of the American Dream in the aftermath of the disturbances. Future programs will address incoming Police Chief Willie Williams, the “silent black majority” and the white middle class.

Guests on the program have ranged from mainstream politicians such as Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky to more obscure authors, journalists and community activists from all races. Olney and his guests also take questions and comments from listeners.

Although he realizes the audience on radio is far smaller than those he formerly reached via television, Olney said that he’s been surprised by the diversity of political opinions and ethnicity of the listeners who call him.

“It is a goal of mine to bring in new voices,” Olney said. “One of the problems that I had with television news is you talk to the same people with the same points of view over and over again. And I think one of the reasons people feel so disaffected from the political system and the news is that they just aren’t interested in what they’re doing. People feel, I think, some hunger for something that’s more detailed and in depth.”

Olney has not ruled out a return to television, but he said he is unlikely to go back as a full-time reporter in the current television climate, where the emphasis is on “the show” and balancing out bad news with happy, positive stories no matter their irrelevance. He does not exclude himself in his criticism of television news, admitting that he, too, was guilty of falling victim to the harried grind that works against thoughtful, thorough coverage of elected officials and society’s complex problems.

He said that television has practically washed its hands of political coverage, letting politicians slide without addressing important issues. He claims that the failure of television, and to a lesser extent all other media, to cover Washington, Sacramento, county and city officials with a sharp eye has contributed to the alienation of the populace and the rampant decline in voter participation.

“How can you vote for people when you don’t know who the hell they are or what they’re doing?” said Olney. It’s time for the broadcast news media, he said, to tell their viewers and listeners what they should know and care about rather than letting market research dictate what gets on the air.

“I have no idea if the audience will respond to serious coverage, but it’s worth a try. It seems to me if we’re going to have democracy, we must have an educated electorate. I’m not saying that the media’s rededicating itself to really covering elected officials is necessarily going to bring about an informed electorate, but let’s give it a shot. Let’s do it. Let’s get off our butts.”