Concerned Commuters Lose Their Way

We local political junkies were condemned to a boring nightly commute when public radio station KCRW-FM dropped the 7 p.m. rebroadcast of its respected discussion show “Which Way L.A.”

The hourlong show, hosted by veteran television journalist Warren Olney, who happens to be a friend of mine, will continue live, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday, featuring discussions by participants and outside experts on events stretching from Los Angeles to, as was the case Wednesday, Israel.

The dropping of the 7 p.m. rerun is bad news for we commuters who use the hour to hear intelligent discussion of public affairs. That is particularly true of local events in a town where the electronic media, except for KCET-TV’s excellent “Life & Times” and the short dispatches of news radio, pretty much ignore Southland politics and government.

We’re too few and too old to sustain the show, says KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour. She gave the 7 to 8 p.m. spot to “Metropolis,” a cutting-edge music show with the kind of young audience that KCRW is cultivating.

Unfortunately, this decision rips out another of the few threads that hold our civic fabric together.

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Los Angeles--and I mean the region reaching from the beach to the Inland Empire--is so difficult to explain that few people with the talent to do so ever try. Prototype L.A. intellectuals aren’t turned on by public affairs until their jet lands in Washington or some distant land.

Prior to “Which Way L.A.?” KCRW was typical of that kind of thinking, preoccupied by the rights of prisoners in foreign countries while ignoring the indignities inflicted on inmates of the Los Angeles County Jail. Nothing turned on the station more than a war or a national crisis, events that would bring Seymour herself to the microphone.

Our own war, the 1992 riots, awakened Seymour to the troubles that afflicted the station’s listening area, which extends far beyond its Santa Monica College studio. She was inspired to devise a show where the disparate parts of the region, and its hopelessly divided leadership, would have a voice, a place where they could talk, vent and hopefully find common ground. She asked Olney, who has a calm, no-nonsense, above-the-fray style, to moderate. The show was so successful that Seymour made it permanent and said recently, “It is central to the identity of KCRW.”

In view of that, I asked Seymour why she was dropping the 7 p.m. rebroadcast.

The “Metropolis” music show, she said, draws the young leaders KCRW wants. “We have the youngest audience of any public radio station in the country and we went after that,” Seymour said.

In the media business, numbers rule.

In February, Seymour saw a chance to increase that audience when KSCA dropped its innovative rock format and became a Spanish-language station. Seymour said that members of the young KSCA audience were also fans of two KCRW music shows, “Morning Becomes Eclectic” and “Metropolis.” Those two programs, in fact, were largely responsible for bringing in 2,000 new contributors during KCRW’s recent fund-raising drive.

The “Metropolis” audience was bigger than that of the “Which Way L.A.?” rebroadcast. “Most people catch ‘Which Way L.A.?’ at 1 p.m.,” Seymour said. “The 7 p.m. audience is half the size.”

You can catch “Which Way, L.A.?” at any hour on the KCRW web site (www.kcrw.org)--if you are smart enough to understand how to activate your computer’s audio.

And there’s something new. You can get information and chat room discussion on the Democracy Network web site (www.Democracynet.org). It has lively discussions of topics such as race, Los Angeles City Charter reform and the mayoral election, but not many people have found their way to the site. And despite its substantial amount of information, the site does not yet provide the sharp give and take of a good television or radio show.

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We need more civic discourse in L.A., not less.

Seymour is correct when she says, “We have to go where the audience is.” And nobody can argue with her contention that the young music listeners are a potential new audience for the news and drama shows.

But I felt uneasy when Seymour talked about the future of “Which Way, L.A.?”

“I don’t want to cancel ‘Which Way L.A.?’ ” she said. “I have no intention of canceling it. But we have to experiment with new techniques that make it sexier, more alive. . . . Who knows where it will be in a few months, a few years?”

As a media business veteran, I instinctively get nervous when the boss starts talking about experimenting with new techniques. That can be boss talk for “you’re in trouble.”

This radio drama is just beginning. Stay tuned.