RADIO : Leading L.A. to the Light : After two years, TV news refugee Warren Olney reflects on his reborn career and the unexpected clout of ‘Which Way, L.A.?’

Possibly stranger things have happened in broadcasting, but Warren Olney’s trans-media journey from the anchor desks at Channels 2 and 13 to his seat at the controls of KCRW-FM’s “Which Way, L.A.?” remains in defiance of the laws of electronic journalism. Highly paid TV news people do not, as a rule, migrate to the prestigious poverty of public radio. Few TV anchors would probably qualify even if they had the desire, and few have the desire because the money and celebrity are in television. Olney, at 56, has taken the road less traveled. And it has remade his career.

Hurled onto the air by local National Public Radio affiliate KCRW (89.9) in the wake of the April, 1992, riots, “Which Way, L.A.?” in two years has surpassed even its creators’ best expectations, becoming a critical daily gathering place for the hearts and minds of this complex and troubled megalopolis, a small clearing where it often seems that the warring tribes are talking to one another.

The head gatherer at this 1 p.m. Monday-Friday democratic inquiry (the program is rebroadcast at 7 p.m.) is Olney, who seems to be doing something no one has ever done before, at least in Los Angeles, by combining the skills of a political reporter with those of a diplomat and street referee, forging a new role as a kind of ombudsman of the air.

He sits alone in a small basement studio on the campus of Santa Monica College and reins in by telephone five or six carefully chosen guests--activists, elected officials, ministers, reporters, professors, ordinary citizens--sometimes taking additional callers, probing, mediating and making as clear as possible the conflicting points of self-interest surrounding a given issue. It’s an hour of in-depth discussion with, of course, no commercial breaks.

The show has been essential listening in government offices and newsrooms but also in kitchens and cars and on portable radios tuned in by Angelenos trying to make sense of the law, the schools, the police, the environment, crime and health care, as well as the forces of race, class and culture that set the city on fire two years ago.

“It does pack some wallop in the political and governmental community,” says Westside city councilman and former mayoral candidate Zev Yaroslavsky, who has been a guest on the show several times. “When I’m on, people tell me they’ve heard me. People definitely listen. If somebody says something newsworthy or interesting on ‘Which Way, L.A.?’ it will be all around town that day.”

One measure of the show’s clout came last year during a program on the mayoral campaign when, at one point, the leading candidates--Michael Woo, Richard Katz, Richard Riordan and Joel Wachs--were all on hold, waiting for Olney to question them.

“He manages to make domestic stuff compelling, with a very high level of debate,” says Ian Masters, the host of the long-running Sunday morning foreign policy program “Background Briefing” on public station KPFK-FM (90.7). “Not only is it rare to have somebody talking about something important, but he’s doing it when the trend in the media is to be more circus-like, with less and less reasoning.”

Unlike the personalities who dominate commercial talk radio, Olney chooses not to flaunt his own opinions. He has not taken it as his mission to be amusing or provocative or as deliberately charming as the popular and genteel Michael Jackson of KABC-AM (790). Yet he has been a powerful presence on the air: a voice full of curiosity and intellect that is somehow soothing at the same time. In the continuing social disarray that is Los Angeles, it has sometimes seemed that if anyone is pulling the city together it’s not Mayor Riordan, it’s not Magic Johnson, it’s, of all people, Warren Olney.

“Well, it’s Ruth Seymour and it’s Larry Stein and it’s Sarah Spitz and a lot of people,” Olney says when he hears this, acknowledging the KCRW team that assembles the show with him. “And it’s the guests who really make it. But if that’s true, if it does have that function to some extent, then that’s the highest form of achievement as far as I’m concerned. You know there aren’t a lot of things that do pull this place together.”

The closest thing to Olney’s show is the nightly half-hour “Life & Times” on KCET-TV Channel 28, which is a more conventional talk show, with three seated hosts and frequent in-studio guests.

While the audience for “Which Way, L.A.?” may be small (about 150,000 listeners a week) by the standards of television ratings or Howard Stern radio numbers, it is considered an influential and diverse group.

“It’s not just the yuppie Westside,” Olney says. “I get a lot of response from government and a surprising amount of recognition from places I didn’t expect it--from the black community in particular. It’s hard to account for that except to say that we are dealing with issues that other people aren’t, giving people a voice that they don’t have elsewhere. And taking them seriously, which is probably the most important thing. That’s one of the lessons of the riots: People were pissed off from not being heard from, being ignored.”

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Olney walked away from KCOP-TV Channel 13 and a hefty six-figure salary in December, 1991, because, he says, “I just didn’t want to do it anymore, really. I wanted to do something different and sort of get back to where I started, which was reporting. I was casting about. Ironically, I had thought about doing radio because I’ve always liked radio. I grew up with radio as a listener.”

Yet he had never worked in radio. He started his career in newspapers and jumped to TV early. He met Ruth Seymour (then Hirschman), KCRW’s general manager, in the 1970s, when both were members of a local journalists’ chapter of Amnesty International, the organization that monitors political imprisonment and torture around the world. After leaving television, he ran into her at a social gathering and told her that he listened to the station and that if she ever needed any help, he was available.

“I never thought of Warren as a television anchor,” Seymour says. “I always saw him in the context of that group, which shared certain concerns. I knew he was somebody interested in the world, human rights and the way the city operated.”

Seymour, whose critics had accused KCRW of having a preoccupation with national and international affairs at the exclusion of local politics, took the riots as a further sign that the high-profile station had to change some of its focus. She called Olney and asked him to host a one-time round table on the riots presented in concert with a related show on PBS affiliate KCET.

Things went so well that she asked him to come back and do it for a week, then a second week, as Los Angeles continued to re-examine what had happened to itself on April 29, 1992. Believing that the show might have legs, Seymour came up with a running title, “Which Way, L.A.?”

“After two weeks there was still stuff to talk about,” Olney recalls. “I had a sense that my former colleagues (in TV) would be going back to business as usual, which I think they subsequently did, so we thought maybe we can keep some of these things alive a little longer. So then it went on for the summer and then, Jesus, the rest of the year, and then we got a grant to do it for another year. So here we are still doing it. I had no intention of doing this. It came about completely by accident.”

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Though he may have been a new figure to KCRW listeners, Olney had been a familiar face on local television news since the ‘70s, having worked for Channels 2, 4, 7 and 13 as either a reporter or anchor. It became apparent from the first days of “Which Way, L.A.?” that he was not just another big, round voice bringing the sound of television news to public radio. But then, he had never exactly been a typical TV newsman.

“He was one of the guys who did his homework,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Wachs, who remembers Olney as a TV reporter. “When he’d come to interview you, he was always well-prepared. He took the time to become knowledgeable.”

He is, to be precise, Warren Olney IV, a fourth-generation Californian whose great-grandfather was the mayor of Oakland, a friend of conservationist John Muir and a founder of the Sierra Club. His father, Warren Olney III, was a Bay Area prosecutor and state attorney general who became head of the criminal division of the Justice Department under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Warren IV grew up in Berkeley, then moved with his family to Washington, D.C., for high school. He went to exclusive Amherst College in Massachusetts and while he was still an undergraduate married his high school sweetheart--not an everyday occurrence at Amherst, which was then all-male. The marriage ended in divorce after five years and two children. (He has, in all, four children and four grandchildren from three wives.)

After doing graduate work in English at Berkeley and Cornell, Olney was drafted into the Army in 1963 and almost got sent to Vietnam as a radio operator. But his military job was changed to information specialist and he served out his time at Ft. Monroe, S.C., writing news releases and speeches for generals. He hastens to add that this was not what steered him into journalism:

“I don’t want to give credit to the Army for anything positive in my life, except learning how to beat the system, learning how to survive.”

He took his first newspaper job in 1965 at the Newport News, Va., Daily Press. “I had always wanted to be a writer,” he says. “And I had no idea how you could make a living at that except to be a reporter. Then I found out I could do it.”

Before long, Olney was back in California, at the Sacramento Bee, then switched to television, becoming the Sacramento bureau chief for a San Francisco TV station.

He says he loved TV--at first: “There was a different ethic at the time, more emphasis on reporting and what’s the story. Reporters were asked what they had learned when they came back rather than why didn’t it turn out the way the producer thought it was going to look before you left. You could actually tell a story. A story of four minutes was not unusual. So I had a wonderful time. It’s fun to make these little movies, you know, it really is. It’s a kick.”

Olney went to Washington to work for local stations, then returned to California in 1970, ending up in Los Angeles at Channel 2 in 1972.

“Television anchoring was never my goal or particular interest. I just did it because they paid you. It’s advancement, and when you’re in the business you want to advance. And I’m enough of a performer, I suppose, that I enjoyed that aspect of it.”

He prefers not to discuss how much money he made in television, except to say that it was “three or four times” as much as he is making at KCRW, which in any case is paying him more than the station has ever paid anyone, says Seymour, the general manager.

“I made a lot, but I certainly did not ascend to the stratospheric heights that are current today, which I find obscene--appalling, absolutely appalling. Again, as a reporter, how much do you need? These guys are getting a million bucks--(Paul) Moyer and (Jerry) Dunphy. And, you know, there are a lot better ways to spend that money.”

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Olney, who lives near the border of Venice and the Marina, gets to the station each day about 10:30 a.m. and takes a seat at a desk in a room with eight other desks, occupied by staff and volunteers.

When he first came to KCRW, Seymour recalls, “I told him, ‘I’ll get you a desk,’ and he said, ‘I don’t need a desk.’ Where do you get a TV anchorman who says he doesn’t need a desk? He fit in right away.”

On a recent morning he was dressed for work in loose khakis and a long-sleeve cotton blue shirt, unbuttoned at the neck and rolled up to his forearms. His face is tanned and serious, but one thing you can’t hear on the radio is the look of refined amusement that crinkles his features from time to time.

He goes over the day’s program with producers Spitz, Stein and other aides. He’s told what guests have been contacted, and he composes the day’s news summary that he will read at the top of the hour.

Olney, Seymour, Spitz and Stein meet about twice a week to brainstorm topics. Coming up with four, five or six appropriate guests day after day can be a killing regimen. (“I don’t know how he finds all these people,” Yaroslavsky says.) “Incredible,” says Olney, saluting his producers. “Their achievement in doing this is not to be dismissed. I’m not being modest when I say that.”

Sometimes the day’s scheduled subject is pushed aside for more pressing events, as when the verdicts in the Reginald O. Denny beating case were returned or the day of the Northridge earthquake.

The show is done completely on the phone. There are never in-studio guests. “We discovered that people are more candid on the phone,” says producer Stein. “Somehow they seem freer.” Guests call in from office phones, car phones and airport lounges. At least one, American Civil Liberties Union spokesman Allan Parachini, called from an airliner somewhere over Idaho.

While he sits alone in the studio with his headphones, Olney faces a small computer monitor that connects him with Spitz and Stein, seated in another room working the phones and typing messages that tell him who’s on-line and who’s not.

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His style has been likened to that of Ted Koppel of ABC’s “Nightline,” but Olney doesn’t seem to be imitating anyone, especially Koppel, whose self-importance can loom larger than his subjects.

“I see myself as what I’ve always been, which is a reporter, essentially,” Olney says. “So what I’m trying to do is get people to tell me what they think. I’ll ask whatever question it takes to get them to do that. That’s what’s satisfying to me. And I want to hear from people whose ideas I don’t find compatible.”

He does not pre-interview the guests, preferring to take them as they come. “In so many ways, it’s similar to what I’ve always done,” he says. “When I did interviews for television, I don’t know that they’ve been all that different from the kinds of interviews I’ve done on the air, but you just didn’t see them. Because you just take a little piece out of it.”

One difference on “Which Way, L.A.?” is that Olney must function not just as a reporter but as someone who, in Stein’s words, “can really listen to people and facilitate interaction among them.”

The interaction can be mild or it can get tense, as it did on a recent show about the shooting of a Latino youth in Lynwood by a Korean grocer who told police the boy had stolen a bag of cookies. Guests included a Latino member of the Lynwood City Council, Armando Rea, and a Korean American activist, Marsha Choo, who by the final 15 minutes of the show were shouting at each other.

Olney did not make peace between them, but with his own questions he succeeded in framing the dispute so that its different angles of interpretation were plain and palpable. There was a discussion of how the story had been played in The Times and on television. Angela Oh, a Korean attorney, came on to mention that the English-language press had failed to notice that, in the last year, more than 40 Korean store owners in Los Angeles had been shot, 19 fatally.

It was not, in other words, the usual news.

After the show, which he likens to taking a daily exam, Olney winds down by calling as many of the guests as he can reach to thank them for appearing. He tends not to eat lunch, but snacks on a fruit bar packed from home while he busies himself with thoughts about upcoming shows and stays around for a couple more hours.

For relaxation he takes long walks on the beach. He recently learned how to play golf, but he’s not sure he wants this known. “It’s such an imperialistic game,” he says as an afterthought.

He spends a lot of time with his wife, Marsha Temple, a lawyer and aspiring fiction writer, whom he remarried last year. The two met in 1972 when she was working for George S. McGovern’s presidential campaign and Olney was covering it. They married in 1975 and divorced in 1983.

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“Which Way, L.A.?” has become “the 900-pound gorilla” at KCRW, in General Manager Seymour’s words. A station once criticized for its lack of local news and public affairs is now harnessed to a show about Los Angeles that is its most expensive and ambitious undertaking ever--made possible with grants from GTE, the California Community Foundation and other donors, along with the station’s 40,000 paying members.

Two years after the riots, the show, like the city itself, has backed away from the heat of those first fearful months, when the future seemed cast in ethnic hatreds and doom.

The show’s focus has broadened to include such topics as the war in Bosnia, the role of regents at the University of California, the assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, “the new nihilism,” the press and the Whitewater affair and violence in motion pictures.

Olney concedes that the focus has changed somewhat, but he says emphatically that he believes the relevance of the program’s title is not in danger.

“L.A. seems to represent the world. I can’t think of a subject except maybe arctic cold that wouldn’t apply to L.A. It’s the most exciting thing about it and the most daunting. There’s no way we can stop being topical.”

As for the political temperature of the city, he says: “I’m not sure much has changed. People just aren’t as mad about it at the moment. But you wonder when they might get mad again.”

He says that he is committed to the show for the foreseeable future and that he hopes to augment his salary with a number of video projects he plans to produce on the side.

“You don’t get paid a lot for doing this. On the other hand, you have to decide what you want to do with your life. There frankly are not a lot of jobs--I can’t think of any at the moment--in local television that appeal to me. This appeals to me a lot. There’s enormous freedom and independence. The value structure is different.

“Every once in a while somebody (in TV) says, ‘Jesus, I wish I could do that’--although not too often. I don’t want to ask why.”*

* “Which Way, L.A.? “ airs weekdays at 1 and 7 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9), serving Los Angeles and Orange counties. The program can be heard in Ventura County on KCRU-FM (89.1) and in the Palm Springs area on KCRY-FM (89.3). Information: (310) 450-5183.