The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  It’s no joke. See for example the John Ziegler Show’s producer, Emiliano Limon, who broke in at KFI as a weekend overnight host before moving across the glass:

  “What’s amazing is that when you get new people who think that they can do a talk-radio program, you watch them for the first time. By three minutes into it, they have that look on their face like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got ten minutes left. What am I going to say?’ And that’s what happened to me a lot. So you end up talking about yourself [which, for complex philosophical reasons, the producer disapproves of], or you end up yammering.” Emiliano is a large, very calm and competent man in his midthirties who either wears the same black LA Times T-shirt every day or owns a whole closetful of them. He was pulled off other duties to help launch KFI’s experimental Live and Local evening show, an assignment that obviously involves working closely with Mr. Z., which Emiliano seems to accept as his karmic punishment for being so unflappable and easy to get along with. He laughs more than everyone else at KFI put together.

  “I remember one time, I just broke after five minutes, I was just done, and they were going, ‘Hey, what are you doing, you have another ten minutes!’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what else to say!’ And that’s what happens. For those people who think ‘Oh, I could do talk radio,’ well, there’s more to it. A lot of people can’t take it once they get that taste of, you know, ‘Geez, I gotta fill all this time and sound interesting?’

  “Then, as you keep on doing it over the days, there’s something that becomes absolutely clear to you. You’re not really acting on the radio. It’s you. If no one really responds and the ratings aren’t good, it means they don’t like you.” Which is worth keeping very much in mind.

  An abiding question: Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don’t like to talk about it.

  From outside, though, one of the best clues to how a radio station understands its audience is spots. Which commercials it runs, and when, indicate how the station is pitching its listeners’ tastes and receptivities to sponsors. In how often particular spots are repeated lie clues to the length of time the station thinks people are listening, how attentive it thinks they are, etc. Specific example: Just from its spot load, we can deduce that KFI trusts its audience to sit still for an extraordinary amount of advertising. An average hour of the John Ziegler Show consists of four program segments: :06-:17, :23-:30, :37-:46, and :53-:00, or thirty-four minutes of Mr. Z. actually talking. Since KFI’s newscasts are never more than ninety seconds, and since quarterly traffic reports are always bracketed by “live-read” spots for Traffic Center sponsors, that makes each hour at least 40 percent ads; the percentage is higher if you count Sweepers for the station and promos for other KFI shows.

  For instance, one has only to listen to Coast to Coast With George Noory’s ads for gold as a hedge against hyperinflation, special emergency radios you can hand-crank in case of extended power failure, miracle weight-loss formulas, online dating services, etc., to understand that KFI and the syndicator regard this show’s audience as basically frightened, credulous, and desperate.

  (ad-wise, a lucrative triad indeed)

  A live read is when a host or newsperson reads the ad copy himself on-air. They’re sort of a radio tradition, but the degree to which KFI weaves live reads into its programming is a great leap forward for broadcast marketing. Live-read spots are more expensive for advertisers, especially the longer, more detailed ones read by the programs’ hosts, since these ads (a) can sound at first like an actual talk segment and (b) draw on the personal appeal and credibility of the host. And the spots themselves are often clearly set up to exploit these features—see for instance John Kobylt’s live read for LA’s Cunning Dental Group during afternoons’ John Ken: “Have you noticed how bad the teeth are of all the contestants in these reality shows? I saw some of this the other day. Discolored, chipped, misshaped, misaligned, rotted-out teeth, missing teeth, not to mention the bleeding, oozing, pus-y gums. You go to Cunning Dental Group, they will take all your gross teeth and in one or two visits fix them and give you a bright shiny smile.” Even more expensive than live reads are what’s called “endorsements,” which are when a host describes, in ecstatically favorable terms, his own personal experience with a product or service. Examples here include Phil Hendrie’s weight loss on Cortislim, Kobylt’s “better than 20-20” laser-surgery outcome with Saddleback Eye Center, and Mr. Bill Handel’s frustrations with dial-up ISPs before discovering DSL extreme. These ads, which are KFI’s most powerful device for exploiting the intimacy and trust of the listener-host relationship, also result in special “endorsement fees” paid directly to the host.

  (It’s unclear how one spells the adjectival form of “pus,” though it sounds okay on-air.)

  Handel, whose KFI show is an LA institution in morning drive, describes his program as “in-your-face, informational, with a lot of racial humor.”

  And this is the load just on a local program, one for which the Clock doesn’t have to be split with a syndicator.

  It’s not that KFI’s unaware of the dangers here. Station management reads its mail, and as Emiliano Limon puts it, “If there’s one complaint listeners always have, it’s the spot load.” But the only important issue is whether all the complaints translate into actual listener behavior. KFI’s spot load is an instance of the kind of multivariable maximization problem that M.B.A. programs thrive on. It is obviously in the station’s financial interest to carry just as high a volume of ads as it can without hurting ratings—the moment listeners begin turning away from KFI because of too many commercials, the Arbitron numbers go down, the rates charged for ads have to be reduced, and profitability suffers. But anything more specific is, again, guesswork. When asked about management’s thinking here, or whether there’s any particular formula KFI

  It’s a little more complicated than that, really, because excessive spots can also affect ratings in less direct ways—mainly by lowering the quality of the programming. Industry analyst Michael Harrison, of Talkers magazine, complains that “The commercial breaks are so long today that it is hard for hosts to build upon where they left off. The whole audience could have changed. There is the tendency to go back to the beginning and re-set up the premise. It makes it very difficult to do what long-form programming is supposed to do.”

  uses to figure out how high a spot load the market will bear, Ms. Bertolucci will only smile and shrug as if pleasantly stumped: “We have more commercials than we’ve ever had, and our ratings are the best they’ve ever been.”

  SEMI-EDITORIAL Even in formal, on-record, and very PR-savvy interviews, the language of KFI management is filled with little unconscious bits of jargon—“inventory” for the total number of ad minutes available, “product” for a given program, or (a favorite) “to monetize,” which means to extract ad revenue from a given show—that let one know exactly where KFI’s priorities lie. Granted, the station is a business, and broadcasting is not charity work. But given how intimate and relationship-driven talk radio is, it’s disheartening when management’s only term for KFI’s listeners, again and again, is “market.”

  How often a particular spot can run over and over before listeners just can’t stand it anymore is something else no one will talk about, but the evidence suggests that KFI sees its audience as either very patient and tolerant or almost catatonically inattentive. Canned ads for local sponsors like Robbins Bros. Jewelers, Sit ’n Sleep Mattress, and the Power Auto Group play every couple hours, 24/7, until one knows every hitch and nuance. National saturation campaigns for products like Cortislim vary things somewhat by using both endorsements and canned spots. Pitches for caveat emptor-type nostrums like Avacor (for hair loss), Enzyte (“For natural male enhancement!”), and Altovis (“Helps fight daily fatigue!”) often
repeat once an hour through the night. As of spring’04, though, the most frequent and concussive ads on KFI are for mortgage and home-refi companies—Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Advantix Lending. Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates,

  CONSUMER ADVISORY As it happens, these two are products of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, an Ohio company with annual sales of more than $100 million, as well as over 3,000 complaints to the BBB and the Attorney General’s Office in its home state alone. Here’s why. The radio ads say you can get a thirty-day free trial of Enzyte by calling a certain toll-free number. If you call, it turns out there’s a $4.90 S&H charge for the free month’s supply, which the lady on the phone wants you to put on your credit card. If you acquiesce, the company then starts shipping you more Enzyte every month and auto-billing your card for at least $35 each time, because it turns out that by taking the thirty-day trial you’ve somehow signed up for Berkeley’s automatic-purchase program—which the operator neglected to mention. And calling Berkeley Nutraceuticals to get the automatic shipments and billings stopped doesn’t much help; often they’ll stop only if some kind of consumer agency sends a letter. It’s the same with Altovis and its own “free trial.” In short, the whole thing is one of those irksome, hassle-laden marketing schemes, and KFI runs dozens of spots per day for Berkeley products. The degree to which the station is legally responsible for an advertiser’s business practices is, by FTC and FCC rules, nil. But it’s hard not to see KFI’s relationship with Berkeley as another indication of the station’s true regard for its listeners.

  FYI: Enzyte, which bills itself as a natural libido and virility enhancer (it also has all those “Smiling Bob & Grateful Wife” commercials on cable TV), contains tribulis terrestris, panax ginseng, ginko biloba, and a half dozen other innocuous herbal ingredients. The product costs Berkeley, in one pharmacologist’s words, “nothing to make.” But it’s de facto legal to charge hundreds of dollars a year for it, and to advertise it as an OTC Viagra. The FDA doesn’t regulate herbal meds unless people are actually falling over from taking them, and the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t have anything like the staff to keep up with the advertising claims, so it’s all basically an unregulated market.

  (Calls to KFI’s Sales department re consumers’ amply documented problems with Enzyte and Altovis were, as the journalists say, not returned.)

  APR, FICO . . . where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI’s audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, on and on and on.

  Emiliano Limon’s “It’s you” seems true to an extent. But there is also the issue of persona, meaning the on-air personality that a host adopts in order to heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike. It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But a host’s persona is not the same as outright acting. For the most part, it’s probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.

  (somewhat paradoxically)

  In some cases, though, the personas are more contrived and extreme. In the slot preceding Mr. Z.’s on KFI, for instance, is the Phil Hendrie Show, which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta-talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest—a man who’s leaving his wife because she’s had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, a retired colonel who claims that females’ only proper place in the military is as domestics and concubines for the officers—and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing’s a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie with the aid of mike processing and a first-rate board op, and the show’s real entertainment is the callers, who don’t know it’s all a gag—Hendrie’s real audience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the “guests” yank their chain. It’s all a bit like the old Candid Camera if the joke perpetrated over and over on that show were convincing somebody that a loved one had just died. So obviously Hendrie—whose show now draws an estimated one million listeners a week—lies on the outer frontier of radio persona.

  (who really is a gifted mimic)

  A big part of John Ziegler’s on-air persona, on the other hand, is that he doesn’t have one. This may be just a function of all the time he’s spent in the abattoir of small-market radio, but in Los Angeles it plays as a canny and sophisticated meta-radio move. Part of his January introduction to himself and his program is “The key to the John Ziegler Show is that I am almost completely real. Nearly every show begins with the credo ‘This is the show where the host says what he believes and believes what he says.’ I do not make up my opinions or exaggerate my stories simply to stir the best debate on that particular broadcast.”

  Apparently, one reason why Hendrie’s show was perfect for national syndication was that the wider dissemination gave Hendrie a much larger pool of uninitiated listeners to call in and entertain the initiated listeners.

  Though Mr. Z. won’t ever quite say so directly, his explicit I-have-no-persona persona helps to establish a contrast with weekday afternoons’ John Kobylt, whose on-air voice is similar to Ziegler’s in pitch and timbre. Kobylt and his sidekick Ken Chiampou have a hugely popular show based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, and then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day. Their personas are what the LA Times calls “brash” and Chiampou himself calls “rabid dogs,” which latter KFI has developed into the promo line “The Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.” What John & Ken really are is professional oiks. Their show is credited with helping jumpstart the ’03 campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis, although they were equally disgusted by most of the candidates who wanted to replace him (q.v. Kobylt: “If there’s anything I don’t like more than politicians, it’s those wormy little nerds who act as campaign handlers and staff. . . . We just happened to on our own decide that Davis was a rotting stool that ought to be flushed”). In ’02, they organized a parade of SUVs in Sacramento to protest stricter vehicle-emissions laws; this year they spend at least an hour a day attacking various government officials and their spokesholes for failing to enforce immigration laws and trying to bullshit the citizens about it; and so on. But the John & Ken Show’s real specialty is gruesome, high-profile California trials, which they often cover on-site, Kobylt eschewing all PC pussyfooting and legal niceties to speak his mind about defendants like 2002’s David Westerfield and the current Scott Peterson, both “scumbags that are guilty as sin.”

  National talk-radio hosts like Limbaugh, Prager, Hendrie, Gallagher, et al. tend to have rich baritone radio voices that rarely peak, whereas today’s KFI has opted for a local-host sound that’s more like a slightly adenoidal second tenor. The voices of Kobylt, Bill Handel, Ken Chiampou, weekend host Wayne Resnick, and John Ziegler all share not only this tenor pitch but also a certain quality that is hard to describe except as sounding stressed, aggrieved, Type A: The Little Guy Who’s Had It Up To Here. Kobylt’s voice in particular has a consistently snarling, dyspeptic, fed-up quality—a perfect aural analogue to the way drivers’ faces look in jammed traffic—whereas Mr. Ziegler’s tends to rise and fall more, often hitting extreme upper registers of outraged disbelief. Off-air, Mr. Z.’s speaking voice is nearly an octave lower than it sounds on his program, which is a bit mysterious, since ’Mondo denies doing anything special to the on-air voice except setting the default volume on the board’s channel 7 a bit low because “John sort of likes to yell a lot.” And Mr. Zieg
ler bristles at the suggestion that he, Kobylt, or Handel has anything like a high voice on the air: “It’s just that we’re passionate. Rush doesn’t get all that passionate. You try being passionate and having a low voice.”

  (as in if you listen to an upset person say “I can’t believe it!”)

  CONTAINS EDITORIAL ELEMENTS It should be conceded that there is at least one real and refreshing journalistic advantage that bloggers, fringe-cable newsmen, and most talk-radio hosts have over the mainstream media: they are neither the friends nor the peers of the public officials they cover. Why this is an advantage involves an issue that tends to get obscured by the endless fight over whether there’s actually a “liberal bias” in the “elite” mainstream press. Whether one buys the bias thing or not, it is clear that leading media figures are part of a very different social and economic class than most of their audiences. See, e.g., a snippet of Eric Alterman’s recent What Liberal Media?: