On the Couch With L.A.’s Resident Therapist

HIS WORKPLACE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A THERAPIST’S OFFICE. FOR ONE thing, there are no comfortable chairs, just a large octagonal table that takes up most of the room. For another, there are never any patients present; the caregiver sits alone at the table, gesturing as he talks, as though to ghosts.

Yet to watch Warren Olney moderate the public-issues talk show “Which Way, L.A.?” on KCRW-FM (89.9) is to observe a master of civil inquiry and the elucidation of underlying truths. He is intelligent, inquisitive and remarkably able to summarize one person’s argument and present it to an opponent as a thing of logic that can be rebutted only with logic. He is a resolute apostle of both-sided-ness.

In the eight years since “Which Way, L.A.?” debuted as KCRW’s response to the anguish of the 1992 riots, Olney has come to be seen, in the words of civil-rights lawyer and frequent guest Connie Rice, as “the therapist to a dysfunctional community.”

Olney’s style tacitly emphasizes to his guests that venom and rhetoric are not welcome. All guests--typically five to eight public officials and/or intellectuals and/or activists per program--participate by telephone and are permitted to speak one at a time, which ensures that they must listen to one another. The tactic helps keep the show above the slough of shouting and snide dismissiveness that characterizes most public-issues broadcasting. “Which Way, L.A.?” almost always ends up illuminating how complex the issues under consideration are, yet the very civility of the discussion seems to convey a hope that somehow they can be resolved civilly.

Although Olney’s show reaches only about 130,000 listeners a week (by comparison, top-rated talk-show host Larry Elder on KABC, a commercial station, draws 355,000 listeners weekly), it’s long been a must-hear for local politicians, officeholders and opinion-makers. Its influence far outreaches its audience share.

This month, Olney went national on public radio with a new daily program, “To The Point,” which incorporates the “Which Way, L.A.?” ethos of being hot off the news (in this case, national and international news), yet cool and reasoned. “Which Way, L.A.?” is still heard nightly on KCRW and is devoted mostly to local content. To do both shows five days a week, the 63-year-old Olney, a Los Angeles television newsman and anchor for years, had to quit co-hosting KCET-TV’s nightly interview program, “Life & Times Tonight.”

Probably no other person in Southern California has listened to as many of the best-informed parties on every conceivable issue, from the public-transit crisis to the endless efforts to reform the LAPD to the intricacies of the statewide ballot issues that emerge each election like poppies in the spring. An affable man, down-to-earth, but almost cleric-like when it comes to upholding his reputation for relentless (some would say excruciating) fairness, Olney is one of the most clued-up people in town.

Yet like any ethical therapist, he is loath to utter judgments, even positive ones, about who are L.A.’s heroes and villains, its wise men and fools.

“I believe there are public officials who deserve to be in the places that they are, and who are doing a good job,” he says. “But I get them on the program, and there are people who have really good and legitimate reasons for being angry at them, or thinking that they’re wrong. And I want to conduct that conversation between the two of them. And if I say, ‘Well, old so-and-so is really a great guy,’ then it makes me less able to perform my role as neutral moderator.”

Olney’s years of immersion in local civic pathologies, however, have given him a profound sense of their etiology, and of the reasons why so many seem so immune to treatment.

Many public institutions here--the unwieldy Los Angeles Unified School District, the overly militarized Los Angeles Police Department, the wasteful MTA--strain, he says, to impose outdated structures and psychologies on an enormous, expanding, ethnically dynamic populace they were never meant to serve.

“Here, for example, you have a school district that has become an $8-billion corporation,” he says. “It has a student population the size of the city of San Francisco--700,000 people--and every day they have to be fed, bused and housed. It is a vast undertaking. To run what is comparable to a multinational corporation in terms of resources and size--and larger in terms of the work force--you have seven Board of Education members, part-time elected officials who earn $24,000 or $25,000 a year and who can appoint two or three people each to help them understand what’s going on.

“The result is, this thing is run by a bureaucracy that is composed of former teachers and administrators--all good, worthy souls--but who have not been trained in management of the kind of enterprise that they suddenly--and ‘suddenly’ isn’t a bad word to use--have to be in charge of. And they have to do things like building hundreds of schools, all at the same time, that people at Bechtel would have trouble doing. It’s ludicrous, in my opinion, to think you can have a smooth-running organization that’s built like that. It was designed for circumstances that no longer exist.”

Olney points to how antiquated civic instincts sank a prime opportunity to create sensible mass transit in Los Angeles County. When the MTA was structured at its inception in 1993, power was apportioned among the 13 board members along traditional lines that guaranteed that parochial considerations would outweigh any truly regional approach to an area-wide need.

“The MTA offered tremendous promise,” he says. “You know, so much money was available to accomplish such important purposes--relieve congestion, ease pollution. The idea was fantastic. So much money was in the MTA that for a period of time the lobbying at the MTA was as intense as it is in Sacramento. But we chose to invest the money by building this massively expensive subway. Before that decision was made, it was argued you could put in a lot of light rail, and it might work better and be much more efficient and economical. Now you have to wonder if those people weren’t right. But instead we have this huge subway, which ultimately will serve very few people.

“The resources were there. You can’t say that there wasn’t the opportunity. But the structure was inadequate. The board of directors, instead of being people who have the interests of the whole at heart, are people chosen because they’d make sure the track comes through my district. When you say L.A. doesn’t work, and consider it on a regional basis, it’s because you have these jurisdictional boundaries and governmental agencies set up to basically function in the 19th century, and a regional agency like the MTA has to reflect that. The notion of centralized planning and sane management just didn’t happen, and now we’ve got an emergency.”

In a curious way, he says, Balkanization is endemic to the dilemma of governing L.A., and yet further Balkanization may be in the cards as San Fernando Valley and San Pedro residents clamor for secession from the city, and disaffected parents call for the breakup of the LAUSD.

Olney, a scion of the old Anglo establishment in California (his great-grandfather was mayor of Oakland, his grandfather a state Supreme Court justice, his father a prosecuting attorney and assistant U.S. attorney general), is fascinated by the growing and ever-morphing ethnic mix that is sending that old power structure into eclipse. The reason Los Angeles is so difficult for the thinkers and policymakers on his program to get their arms around, he says, is because “there’s a different L.A. about every 10 years.”

Although steeped in the city’s civic woes, Olney maintains a perspective that keeps him from being pessimistic about the community’s fate. “We began [“Which Way, L.A.?”] the day after the riots occurred, and shortly thereafter, in very rapid succession, we had fire, flood and earthquake. Since then, all those things are beginning to fade from memory. As we came out of the recession, we found we have a whole new economy, not based on the defense industry, whose demise was supposed to kill us, but reorganized around small business and entrepreneurship, a lot of it fueled by immigration.

“So in a really important sense, L.A. does work, and has been working. If you had been here in 1992--man, this is phoenix rising from the ashes. The difference is just extraordinary. Sure, it looks like we’re about to decline, but you have this constant flux and destruction and rebirth.”

Olney predicts Southern California will not so much solve its problems as find inventive ways to live with them. “The ongoing ways that we cope with these issues are going to be very different from anything we can anticipate,” he says, “because all of these other people who’ve come from all of these other places are going to be part of the coping. I think the best we can hope for is an ongoing, creative approach to change.”

He believes that the region, with its surging economy, congestion and income inequalities, is going to be an object lesson for the rest of America--a kind of pilot project in the efficacy of mixing people from widely varying backgrounds in a burgeoning population while trying to preserve cherished American civic values.

“No place has ever grown so fast or become so diverse so quickly as Los Angeles,” he says. “We can’t envision the future very well because it’s changing so fast. All you can say is it’s going to be different. I mean, everybody’s going to change. It’s not just us Anglos. Latinos will change. Asians will change. Everybody will change. You have to, in order to live together.

“We still have sufficient resources, sufficient imagination and traditions in place that lead me to think that we are going to be a really important evolutionary step. If not, the prospects are really grim. You sort of have to look at it that way. It’s either going to be something really great, or something really awful.”

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com