Talk Radio in Spotlight, Hosts Must Walk Fine Line

When “Steve” from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley called into Oliver L. North’s radio show Monday night complaining that Secret Service agents had interrogated him about his militia ties, North saw an opening to make a broader political point--that, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the media were unfairly demonizing militia men.

“How do you feel about what happened in Oklahoma City?” North asked his caller.

“It’s horrible,” responded Steve. “If anybody had to blow the building up . . . “

“Whoa,” North abruptly injected.

“If anyone had to blow it up,” Steve continued, undeterred, they should “do it during closed hours.”

In the days after a car bomb transformed the guts of a federal office building into a 20-by-30-foot crater, the nation’s conservative radio talk show hosts are being warmed by an unwelcome spotlight. With commentators accusing talk radio of inspiring violence and President Clinton complaining that the airwaves are being used to “spread hate,” talk radio hosts this week went on the counterattack, with broadcasters such as Rush Limbaugh lambasting the media and liberals for seeking “cheap political gain” out of the tragedy.

But the Oklahoma City attack on federal workers and their children also alters the once-easy dynamic between charismatic talk show host and adoring audience. Hosts who routinely espouse the same anti-government themes as the militia movement now must walk a fine line between inspiring their audience--and inciting the most radical among them.

“We need to reduce the hysteria that surrounds all of this,” Limbaugh told his audience, estimated to number 20 million, on Tuesday. “We need to find the people who did this.”

But even as Limbaugh, North and other talk show hosts condemned the bombers, another nationally syndicated talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, was upping the ante, acknowledging that at a July 4 family outing last year, he drew stick figures on targets at a rifle range and named them Bill and Hillary. “Thought it might improve my aim,” he said.

Liddy, a convicted Watergate burglar, also expanded on his oft-repeated view that if agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms burst through the door, the suspects inside should shoot them in the head because “they’ve got a vest underneath.” During a news conference held as part of his WJFK program, aired Tuesday from a Washington suburb, Liddy added that if a head shot doesn’t work, “then shoot to the groin area.”

“They cannot move their hips fast enough and you’ll probably get a femoral artery and you’ll knock them down at any rate,” he added.

A spokesman for the ATF, an agency that has been a prime target of the militia movement’s wrath, accused Liddy of encouraging violence. “He’s talking about murder and incitement to murder,” said Jack Killorin. “Our hands are not bloody. Mr. Liddy can answer for his own.”

On his Tuesday radio show, Liddy called ATF agents--whose 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., led to a bloody, 51-day siege--a “very dangerous group of people. They are out of control.”

During his Senate campaign last fall, North sounded the same alarm against abusive government authority that is driving much of the militia movement, asserting that Congress and the Clinton Administration are endangering the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, “the protections against the door being kicked in in the middle of the night, the protections against unlawful search and seizures.”

Those themes emerged again this week on his one-month-old radio show, which airs on 85 stations. On Monday, he invited Bradley Glover of the South Kansas Militia and Bob Fletcher of the militia group Military of Montana to defend the movement. At North’s prompting, Glover said his group would not open its ranks to radical, potentially violent members.

But Fletcher proved a more troublesome caller for North, who routinely condemned the Oklahoma City bombing as the act of “cowards, low-life people who have absolutely no spine or backbone whatsoever.”

“Bob, let’s cut to the chase,” North said, “do you repudiate the act?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the militia man said. But, he added, “Here’s my point, Ollie: They cannot attack our message and slow us down in spreading the truth (about) corruption in government, and the fact that they are moving toward a dictatorial, one-world government.”

Steve from Shenandoah was one of two callers who indicated support for violent action. “Steve,” North responded, “I don’t think anyone ought to be blowing up buildings in America.”

In an interview Tuesday, North conceded he couldn’t tell whether his views mattered to those callers. But, he added, “I shredded them. I don’t think they deserve any more. Should we screen those callers and turn them over to the FBI? Have we really come to that?”

Clinton returned to the theme of the airwaves Tuesday when, in a speech at Iowa State University, he said: “We must stand up and speak against reckless speech that can push fragile people over the edge, beyond the boundaries of civilized conduct, to take this country into a dark place. I say that no matter where it comes from . . . whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it comes from radio, television or in the movies.”

In Los Angeles, John Kobylt, who co-hosts a talk radio show on KFI, said that he has received at least 50 calls from right-wing extremists since the Oklahoma City bombing, outnumbering calls from people expressing sympathy, grief or outrage about the bombing. Kobylt speculated that extremists are drawn to the ready forum provided by talk radio, and are more persistent in their attempts to get through on clogged phone lines.

“This militia crowd or people sympathetic to them are very angry and very passionate and they rush to the phone much faster than an ordinary person,” Kobylt said. “We don’t do anything to attract these people. . . . They call in first. They’re the most aggressive. These people are extremely paranoid. My opinion is they’re very sick, mentally ill. It’s like believing in UFOs. They have beliefs that are so outrageous and so wacky that it’s hard to comprehend. If you listen to the show, you’d think they’re the only people listening and that impression really concerns me. They’re the nuttiest and the most intent.”

California broadcaster George Putnam, a longtime archconservative KIEV-AM talk show host, called Clinton a “demagogue” several times during his noon-hour show Tuesday and said that any political figure who’s “going to use a dastardly event . . . little babies with their hands blown off and killed” for their own “political advantage” ought to be “drummed out of politics.”

Speaking from his studio in Glendale, Putnam said that “where there is no crisis, a demagogue creates one. He creates fear, Goebbels-style,” referring to Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. “He comes charging in on his white horse.”

Putnam accused liberals of gutting the investigative capacity of America’s law enforcement. He added that America is “heartbroken” by what happened in Oklahoma, but that authorities should have “infiltrated” these groups. “We’d know what these bastards are up to.”

Yet he went on to say, with obvious sarcasm, that Clinton “plans to let the FBI infiltrate potentially menacing groups like the paramilitary even when there is no evidence” they are involved in any criminal activity.

Limbaugh, whose popular talk show airs on 660 stations, initially struck a conciliatory note toward the White House on Tuesday, noting that he would “take at their word” assurances by Administration officials that the President was not referring to Limbaugh on Monday when he condemned the “angry voices . . . (who) leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

But by halfway through his show, Limbaugh was back on the attack. “I think one of (the Administration’s) strategies is to put this thing out and let the press--who has an obvious animus against me--take the ball and run with it.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus in Iowa and Claudia Puig and Judith Michaelson in Los Angeles contributed to this story.