Talk . . . About Timing
What an occasion to miss. What a debut it might have been.
By coincidence--on the very day last week that President Clinton testified before Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury, then admitted to the nation that he had had a relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky that was “not appropriate; in fact, it was wrong”--a radio executive in Glendale, answering a reporter’s question, was unveiling plans for the overhaul of KIEV-AM (870) into a newer, improved and even more definitively conservative talk station.
Michael Reagan, son of former President Ronald Reagan and syndicated radio host, was coming on board. So was Michael Medved, author, film critic, newly minted syndicated radio host and occasional fill-in for Rush Limbaugh.
An outlet that for years was a broadcast backwater, studded with brokered or self-paid programming and errant scheduling, KIEV, under its new owner, Salem Communications Corp., promises to deliver almost wall-to-wall conservative talk and, down the road perhaps, to give talk competitors KFI-AM (640) and KABC-AM (790) a run for the ratings.
Nevertheless, the sound of the new KIEV, a 7-decades-old station with those unlikely call letters that spell out the name of a city in Russia, had to wait until Wednesday, when the station officially changed hands.
That’s when Reagan (8 p.m. to midnight) and Medved (2 to 5 p.m.) joined a lineup that already includes two longtime Southland conservative broadcasters: the stentorian-toned George Putnam, 84, who has been at KIEV’s mikes each noon since 1976, and Ray Briem, 68 (5 to 7 p.m.), who arrived from KABC in 1995.
“What we want to do is build on the foundation that KIEV established with Ray and George and develop a full-time conservative talk station for Los Angeles,” says Dave Armstrong, KIEV’s new vice president and general manager, in a swank office suite in Glendale. He is also a vice president of Camarillo-based Salem, which operates 45 stations, including KLTX-AM (1390) and KKLA-FM (99.5), which are predominantly Christian.
Weekends too? “Eventually, yes,” Armstrong says. “We’ll have some of that but that’s down the road.”
He also thinks that Reagan, 53, and Medved, 49, should help KIEV attract a younger audience.
As for KIEV missing a pivotal day of Clinton’s presidency with Reagan and Medved, the unflappable 53-year-old Armstrong, who began as a radio deejay in Ashtabula, Ohio, at age 19, shrugs. “We didn’t have any choice” on the date of sale. “This [the Clinton scandal] is going to be news for the next six months, not [just] the next week or so.”
Still, KIEV’s listeners did not hear Reagan, who broadcasts to 160 stations, call on four former U.S. presidents to “speak up” on the “total shame” that Clinton brought on the office. Reagan indicated he’d like them to help decide Clinton’s fate. Asked about the four, he named Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush--and Nancy Reagan, in place of former President Reagan, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Nor could KIEV listeners get first crack at Medved’s “different take.” Once a classmate of the Clintons at Yale Law School--he was Hillary Rodham’s study partner in a contracts class--Medved, who broadcasts to some 70 stations from KVI-AM in Seattle, suggests that it was no “tawdry little affair” between Clinton and Lewinsky. He believes the president was “in love” or at least “infatuated” with Monica. That would explain, says Medved, “him wearing the tie so that she would see she was close to his heart. Also, 75 telephone calls?”
Advocating a “middle course” of congressional censure for the president, Medved dismisses impeachment as “unhealthy” for the country and opines that Clinton would never resign: “They’d have to pry his dead clammy fingers off the presidential seal.”
Who ever said that conservative talk was monotoned?
“I’m different” from Putnam, says Briem. “George dwells on the president day in and day out. I talk about things such as alternative medicine.”
There is one key problem involving the two Michaels. Reagan won’t be airing live on KIEV, so that callers here who want to talk to him will have to phone him at syndicator Premiere Radio Networks in Sherman Oaks between 3 and 7 p.m. Medved, who broadcasts live from noon to 3 p.m., will be heard live only in the third hour. The final hour becomes the first hour of his show here, with the first two hours playing afterward on tape.
“This is an item of some frustration to me,” Medved says, but the key noon-to-2 p.m. position is staying put “out of respect for Mr. Putnam.”
KIEV, with a new 20,000-watt daytime signal, had been family-owned since 1961. In May, Salem announced that it would purchase the station from Southern California Broadcasting Co., controlled by brothers Fred and Ron Beaton, for $33.4 million. The Beatons will stay on as consultants for about six months, operating out of their old facility on San Fernando Road in Glendale, while Putnam and others move to a new studio being built in Armstrong’s office floor on Brand Boulevard in Glendale.
As for ratings, Armstrong says that “if you have a niche market, and you concentrate on selling that market, you can do very well without numbers. KKLA has a 0.6 [share] and we do very well. We would like them, but the numbers are not our objective.”
In the most recent Arbitron report, KIEV stayed pretty much in place at No. 37 in the market, with a 0.4% share of audience.
“We want a great radio station that impacts,” notes Armstrong. “There aren’t many conservative talkers in L.A. Rush [on KFI] is the exception.”
To Every Thing There Is a Season: And for Laura Schlessinger (KFI, noon-3 p.m.), a time to be roasted--and a time to be toasted.
In its September issue, Vanity Fair published a scathing profile of the moral advice maven, entitled “Diagnosing Dr. Laura,” noting in a subhead that while she “passes judgment, Schlessinger’s own life is a tangle of contradictions . . . from her early divorce to her recent conversion to orthodox Judaism.” The following week brought word that, today in Israel, Schlessinger receives a 50th anniversary tribute award from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Others receiving the tribute include Lady Margaret Thatcher, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.).
Before leaving for Israel, Schlessinger said, “They felt I was contributing something very importantl by bringing God and religion into a secular show.”
On the show, she also talks about her forthcoming book, written with Rabbi Stewart Vogel, “The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God’s Laws in Everyday Life.”
Asked about the Vanity Fair piece, she said that we live in a time when “character assassination, gossip and innuendo have been elevated to entertainment. There is no shame about blatant lies.” She asserted that those who “covet” and “envy” the success of others often “slip into bearing false witness”--thereby breaking two of the commandments.