A quarter-century of levelheaded talk

ON a Sunday morning like any other, when so many Southern Californians are sleeping in or heading to the beach, Ian Masters, Australian expatriate, former BBC journalist, Hollywood dropout and indefatigable student of American foreign policy, has arrived at his post behind a live microphone in the political free-fire zone of KPFK-FM (90.7) on Cahuenga Boulevard.

Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Masters nevertheless has an air of authority about him. Dressed in a smart sports coat and pressed jeans, with a healthy shag of white hair and overseas accent, he reminds you of a former road manager for the Rolling Stones. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, my girlfriend was up sick,” he tells me moments before the clock in the studio reads 11 a.m. straight up, and he bends into the microphone to introduce today’s edition of “Background Briefing,” his brainy show about current events and geopolitics that he has been doing for 26 years.

Like many programmers in public radio, Masters gets no money -- zero -- for all the hours that go into producing a program that is considerably more ambitious and frequently more illuminating than such Sunday morning television fare as NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”

Though he doesn’t earn a salary for “Background Briefing” and “Live From the Left Coast,” the name given to a second hour he got as a consolation prize in 2002 for surviving one of the purges that occasionally sweep through left-leaning Pacifica affiliate KPFK, the two shows earn a good amount of money for the station in donations. “In the last pledge drive, Ian raised $10,600 an hour,” says KPFK senior producer Alan Minsky, “which was substantially higher than any other show -- and he’s not in a prime radio slot.”

On this day, Masters will interview ex-CIA officer Graeme Fuller to talk about the possibility of a U.S. military strike against Iran; he will talk to constitutional law professor Dawn Johnsen of Indiana University about the U.S. attorney firings and then to Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who has called for the impeachment of President Bush. In the second hour he will phone “old friend” Gloria Steinem to talk about the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama rivalry and then interview Jeremy Scahill, the author of “Blackwater,” about the 100,000 American private contractors operating in Iraq.

He will cross this expanse of intellectual and political terrain armed with smart questions drawn from a store of knowledge and reasoned opinion that he does not hesitate to share. His interviews tend to be more conversational and more probing than most -- a rare mix that eschews the kind of formal objectivity familiar to American broadcast journalism without lapsing into pure advocacy or rant. With his clear, understated voice set at an unwavering pitch, Masters seems to be pushing ever onward toward the heart of the matter.

“You try not to bring baggage to the story,” he says. “You try to be an advocate for the truth, not an ideology. Ideology has been the death of the American right and self-righteousness the death of the left.” It’s not just his accent that reveals that Masters grew up in a very different political culture. “Politics is more of a contact sport in Australia and England,” he notes.

“He has the ability to ask questions and provide a point of view that inspires people to go deeper into subjects,” says Andrew Davis, the Hollywood director of “The Fugitive” and “Collateral Damage” and a longtime friend who has used Masters as a consultant. “He sees linkages that other people don’t see.”

Often out in front of the herd, Masters was among the first to interview former diplomat and WMD-debunking emissary Joseph C. Wilson IV about the problematic case made by the administration to go to war. Well before Scooter Libby went on trial for perjury in the outing of Wilson’s CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, Masters interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who told him he believed the forged letters implicating the African nation Niger in uranium sales to Iraq (and mysteriously acquired by an Italian intelligence agency) originated not in Niger or Italy but in the U.S.

Sometimes the program contains so much bracing information from political insiders, scholars and authors about the deceits and policy failures of government leaders, it is hard to listen and not despair.

“It is a dilemma,” Masters says, “but you can’t be Pollyanna. I think people fighting the good fight are inspiring. At the end of the day, it’s all about trying to empower citizenship. I’ve spent some time in Washington, and I’ll tell you there isn’t much to expect from the people on the Hill. The lobbyists are in control. Until the people get back into it, nothing is going to change.”

Documentary as springboard

THE seeds of the program were sown in 1978, when Masters, then a film editor, was enlisted by cinematographer Haskell Wexler to help make the anti-nukes documentary “War Without Winners,” produced by a group of retired generals and admirals. The TV documentary was a response to “The Price of Peace and Freedom,” a 30-minute Pentagon-friendly film made by the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, a group that included Paul Wolfowitz and George H.W. Bush.

To gather material, Masters went on an extensive fact-finding tour of Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon to find a justification for the U.S. to amass more nuclear weapons. If he was going to make an advocacy film, he wanted to know the arguments on the other side.

The experience left him with “all this knowledge and nowhere to go,” he says, until he got a call from someone at KPFK with the offer of a Sunday morning show. “Reagan was coming on,” Masters remembers. “And there was a genuine concern that we were moving toward Armageddon.”

The contacts he had made in government, the military and the intelligence agencies were the start of his compiling what he calls a great Rolodex, but those same official sources have made him an object of suspicion among some KPFK supporters who have accused him of being a government apologist and CIA stooge.

The fact that he is a white male, says one station insider, does not help Masters win support internally at multicultural KPFK -- or at the Pacifica network, which does not distribute the program to the other four Pacifica stations.

Masters -- who is 63, has been married twice, to an English and an American actress, and has a 22-year-old daughter -- recently graduated from UCLA. While he has missed out on getting rich like many of his peers, he has kept interesting company along the way, sharing flats in London with Monty Python’s Eric Idle and Australian director Bruce Beresford, and working alongside Jonathan Miller and Lindsay Anderson at the BBC. He got to know Mick Jagger while working as an editor for Tony Richardson on the 1970 movie “Ned Kelly.”

He grew up in Byron Bay, a small town on the eastern coast of Australia. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother the respected novelist Olga Masters. He has five siblings, all of whom ended up in some form of professional media. Two sisters and a brother work in Australian television, one brother is a sportswriter in Australia and another is a film director in England.

After attending the University of Sydney, he won a scholarship to film school in Paris during the New Wave but didn’t stay long. “It was a waste of time, very academic.” He quit and started shooting film for news agencies, including the BBC, where he became an editor.

He moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s, met Wexler and got work editing documentaries, including “The Secret Life of Plants.” He tried his hand at screenwriting and wrote one feature for 20th Century Fox, an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum espionage thriller “The Osterman Weekend” (1983), the last film directed by Sam Peckinpah. “That was a very unpleasant experience,” he says.

Masters muses that he could have been a contender as a screenwriter, earning the financial security that has eluded him. “If I had stayed with the [expletive] system, but I wasn’t A-list.”

He says he does not regret not having multiple homes and multiple Mercedes common to many of the people in the business who are his friends. “What I’d like to do is get paid for what I do,” he says.

“We all know he’s always in money trouble,” says Wexler. “He lives very frugally.” When he is not preparing for the program, Masters gives lectures, moderates panels and develops movie projects. He also wants to become an American citizen after more than three decades living as a legal resident alien. “I want to vote,” he says.

By the time Rocky Anderson is on the line and on the air, Masters’ producer, Louis Vandenberg, is sweating bullets -- or at least sweating. The thermostat in the studio is not working, and it is unseasonably warm inside KPFK. “This is the support we get for being the fund drive leader,” Vandenberg says with a bite. The producer, who works during the week as an administrator at UC Riverside, sits in front of a computer screen flashing images of news Web pages he is monitoring while trying to get a good phone line for Steinem.

Masters, on the other side of the glass, finishes up with Anderson, who has explained the history of impeachment in Britain and how the concept of “high crimes,” meaning “political crimes,” found its way across the ocean. It was intended, the mayor says, as a remedy for precisely the kind of behavior exhibited by President Bush in starting an illegal war of aggression, but such an abuse of power has been permitted by a “cowardly” Congress.

“They have enabled this president through their cowardice, I agree with you entirely,” Masters says, in one of those moments that makes it clear this is not “Washington Week in Review.” When the phone line is patched, Masters asks Steinem if she is aware that Hillary Clinton asked Al Gore, yet a potential presidential candidate, if he was in favor of a carbon tax?

Steinem says she was not aware of this and then says, “Ian, you always notice things and bring them to our attention.”

“Gore said, ‘Yes,’ ” Masters says, without skipping a beat. “I wonder if Hillary might be more afraid of Gore than Obama?”

It was something to think about, as usual.