Stations weigh what’s ‘fair’

The field of candidates is as huge as the window for campaigning is tiny -- so how does a radio station comply with Federal Communications Commission rules about equal time, much less be fair and comprehensive in its coverage of the gubernatorial recall campaign?

“There’s no question, it is a challenge,” said Bill Davis, president of Southern California Public Radio, which operates station KPCC-FM (89.3). “When you’ve got nearly 150 people on the ballot, how do you provide meaningful coverage of the candidates?”

Talk station KFI-AM (640) has taken the most democratic approach: Let everyone in. The station is offering one minute of uninterrupted time during Bill Handel’s show, weekdays from 5 to 9 a.m., to each of the 135 candidates seeking to replace Gov. Gray Davis. The takers for what Handel calls “60 seconds of begging” have begun airing this week.

Other stations are being a little more judicious. “Obviously you cannot interview all 135. We couldn’t even if we wanted to,” said Bernard Pendergrass, assistant program director at talk station KABC-AM (790). “We’re trying to talk to all of the key players, period, be they Democrat, Republican, independent, whomever.”

And the station isn’t merely bringing on the front-runners, he said. “We’re trying to get all the ones that pop up, the more entertaining people, like Gary Coleman.”

FCC requirements about equal time in political races cover both advertising and programming and apply equally to radio and television. The rules say that a broadcaster who gives an opportunity to one candidate to get on the air must give the same opportunity to his or her opponents. The time slots don’t have to be identical, but one can’t have afternoon drive while the other gets 3 a.m. And a station that sells time for political advertising is required to charge candidates whatever cut rate they give their best advertisers.

But the rules exempt any newscast, news interview, news documentary or on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events. Concerned broadcasters can ask the FCC if a certain program fits the agency’s definition of news, while ignored candidates have a week from the date of the broadcast to petition for equal time, if the show isn’t exempt. Otherwise, the agency leaves the content of those programs up to the station and its journalistic standards -- so news directors aren’t forced to give the same amount of coverage to billboard queen Angeleyne as they would to Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.

But the FCC reminds broadcasters that along with the news exemption comes “the obligation imposed upon them under this act to operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.”

Other, nonexempt exposure, though, would start the meter running under equal-time rules -- one reason that candidate Arianna Huffington took leave from her stint as co-commentator on the KCRW-FM (89.9) political program “Left, Right & Center.” It’s akin to the reason that television stations aren’t airing Schwarzenegger movies or episodes of Coleman’s series “Diff’rent Strokes.” The FCC has determined, and the courts have agreed, that such exposure can be a means of helping a candidate, making a station liable to give the same air time to the 134 others on the ballot.

Howard Stern was scheduled to have Schwarzenegger on his radio program Thursday morning but decided not to, concerned he would run afoul of the equal-time regulations, said Dana McClintock, spokesman for Infinity Broadcasting, which syndicates Stern’s show, heard locally from 3 to 11 a.m. on KLSX-FM (97.1).

The rule creates an extra headache that broadcasters say they don’t need, because they already have scarcely enough time before the Oct. 7 election to present listeners with the most viable, or at least most interesting, gubernatorial hopefuls.

Bill Davis said KPCC has already interviewed Bustamante, state Sen. Tom McClintock and others. “We want to get as many of the significant candidates as possible. We’ve also had some people who probably don’t have much of a chance of winning, e.g. Larry Flynt,” the publisher of Hustler magazine.

“It’s an incredible story. And the time, the attention, the sheer amount of work that’s required to stay on top of this is mind-boggling,” Bill Davis said. Furthermore, with the looming specter of possible recounts or court challenges, “I would imagine this story won’t be going away, even after Oct. 7.”

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Blackout broadcasts

When the lights went out last week in the Northeast, Midwest and Canada, and people’s digital cable TV and high-speed Internet connections went dead, they dusted off transistor radios, scrounged for 9-volt batteries and tuned in to find out what had happened.

Others sat in their cars, enjoying the air conditioning and dialing into the mass medium least affected by the power outage.

Even at the Museum of Television & Radio in Manhattan, surrounded by electronic conduits of information, the staff had to rely on a bit of technology from the 1950s to determine the scope of the situation.

“The only source of information we had was a small transistor radio. We learned it was not just our neighborhood,,” said curator Ron Simon. “It certainly shows the importance of the very beginnings of broadcasting -- what it meant and still means, how vital it is to the entire community in times of crisis.”

With a few exceptions, such as those stations that went dead without backup power or those that continued airing automated programming, broadcasters throughout the affected region won praise for quickly reassuring a nervous audience that the blackout wasn’t related to terrorism and for filling the darkness with information, advice and entertainment.

Residents without working receivers gathered around those who had them, all getting reassurance from the aural lifeline they and everyone else in their city now shared.

“It was a vital link between the city, the government and the populace. Even the simplest of radios became the most important objects during the whole blackout,” Simon said. “It was a unifying medium. One voice communicating to many different types of people.”

And as he walked home that evening, Simon said, the scene evoked images of the city as it was in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when the air in each neighborhood was filled with sounds of different broadcasts -- from news reports to the Yankees game in Baltimore.

And residents affected by the blackout didn’t just get news via radio. They got help. Amateur radio operators, commonly known as hams, worked with emergency services personnel, as they’ve trained to do in any natural or manufactured disaster.

They provided the Red Cross with communication at shelters and fire scenes, when cellular and conventional telephones didn’t work, and gathered information for Emergency Management officials in affected cities.

At one New York City hospital without power, amateurs fired up their portable transmitters and relayed information to ambulances, the Associated Press reported.

The mobilization came out of the training that thousands of hams nationwide undergo several times a year with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and with state and local authorities, preparing to help out during severe weather or other disasters.

And though the blackout highlighted the industrialized world’s “digital dependency,” as the Toronto Globe and Mail called it, the outage actually brought some freedom to a radio station in Toledo, Ohio.

Classic-rock outlet WXKR-FM (94.5) was able to stay on the air throughout the blackout but had to abandon its computerized playlist, assistant program director Mike McIntyre told the Blade newspaper. Instead, DJs actually picked their own music off of CDs.

“It was fantastic,” McIntyre said. “It was like ‘free-form radio’ from the 1970s. We played Humble Pie, the J. Geils Band, Deep Purple -- stuff we’re never allowed to play.”