Oprah, Phil, Geraldo . . . and Now Here's Jesse : Television: Some critics suggest that Jackson will use his position as host of a proposed talk show "Voices of America" to launch a third try for the presidency.

By DENNIS McDOUGAL

Dec. 5, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A couple who adopted a baby born addicted to crack sat center stage on a talk show set at Fox Television Center last week, discussing the pathos, the Angst and the rewards of raising such a handicapped child.

They were actors, getting the nation’s newest talk show host ready for the real thing: on-camera tears and pride and anger and fear with real crack-baby parents. The kind of stuff with the potential for pulling a 20 share during sweeps.

But they weren’t discussing it with Phil or Oprah or Geraldo. None of those veteran yakkers has ever run for President.

The man asking the questions here has run for the Big Job, however. Twice, in fact. And come 1992, the host of “Voices of America” may, and probably will, run again, though he remains aloof on that possibility at the moment.

In true show-biz style, the Rev. Jesse Jackson brushed off such questions by pointing out that he has a show to worry about these days.

“Reagan was on radio between campaigns,” he said.

Pressed further, Jackson waxed eloquent about the moral obligation to give access to everyone over the public airwaves. But he danced around the obvious--and shrewd--idea that a popular weekly talk show could be a luminous launching pad for the White House.

“One thing that you find when you run for the nomination for President is the incredible number of voices who are never heard,” he sermonized following a rehearsal for the syndicated weekly talk show’s pilot hour. “By participating in a forum like this, you can help set the agenda by helping to determine a public policy debate.”

Hoping to launch the show next fall, Lorimar Television so far has sold “Voices of America” to 35 stations (none yet in Los Angeles) in advance of a convention of syndicated TV programmers scheduled to take place in New Orleans in January. It is there, at the annual meeting of the National Assn. of Television Programming Executives, where most non-network shows are bought and sold.

In recent years, there have been so many of them for sale that most broadcasters agree that the offering had better have a gimmick or be pretty terrific if it hopes to find a place on a station’s schedule. Jackson maintains that his presence alone should be a big draw. And the co-producers of “Voices of America” are very nearly as impressive as the star: legendary pop music producer Quincy Jones and ex-CBS News chief Van Gordon Sauter rehearsed and huddled with Jackson throughout the taping of the pilot, giving Jackson pointers on mannerisms and movement that play best on the tube.

Jackson is no stranger to hitting his mark or knowing his lines, however. As far back as his modish Afro and dashiki days, he was already camerawise, spouting his firebrand catch phrases (“I am . . . somebody!”) during an episode of “Room 222” in the early ‘70s.

Jackson said that his “Saturday Night Live” turn as guest host three years ago gave the program one of its highest ratings of the season, as did his appearance on NBC’s “A Different World.”

Like countless politicians before him, Jackson has little positive to say about network news. “Voices of America” is his answer to what he says is the limited world view offered by evening newscasts and Sunday morning newsmagazines.

“At this point, a relatively small group of people in Washington and a few in New York get to determine what all the rest of us see and respond to, every day. I believe that there is a great market for people who want some substance,” Jackson said.

The pilot is being produced in Los Angeles, but the show’s headquarters will be in Washington, D.C., according to Jackson. If crack babies were the subject of a regular show, and not just the showpiece that he, Sauter and Jones hope to use as a sales tool, Jackson would invite Bush drug enforcement chief William Bennett on “Voices of America” as a special guest.

“Have Bennett sit up there and let the people talk to him,” Jackson said. “ ‘How you gonna handle crack babies with your lock-’em-up program?’ ”

The possibility of opening up the television sets of America for the kind of alternative talk show that Jackson envisions sounds plausible coming out of the man who gave Michael Dukakis a run for the Democratic nomination less than two years ago.

“If you try, you may fail,” he said. “If you don’t try, you’re guaranteed to fail. If we were on the air a month, we would have more (audience exposure) than we have had in the previous 20 years.”

Still, the tentative lineup of segments for the pilot sounds faintly formulaic: a taped opening with Bill Cosby, in which the actor “opens up” about his formative years in Philadelphia, his post-military college years at Temple University and his early show business career; a segment on volunteerism; a segment on the pros and cons of pop music; and a heart-tugger on crack babies, complete with an 800 number that viewers can call in the event that they, too, are interested in adopting.

Cosby and crack babies may sound tabloid, but Jackson assures that they are not. Even with the pilot, he is trying to bring some depth to the subject matter that is not always found in daytime TV.

“Oh, you got your goat with the eye in the middle and two-headed puppies and all kind of personal sexual habits and private fantasies and all kind of perversions and eroticism. . . . Now, there’s a market for that kind of television. But there’s a market for other kinds too,” he said.

“I mean, many people sit around and watch television every morning and they identify with those things. That’s why those programs are successful. They are on in the morning when many unemployed people, senior citizens or second-shift people are home to watch that.”

But in America, there ought to be a choice, Jackson philosophizes.

“Oprah, Geraldo--there are a number of shows that appeal to people whose interest is in these kind of subject matters, which I, you know, find important because people are expressing their feelings about marriage and double dating and divorce. Good. There’s obviously room for that.

“There’s another market over here too. There’s some magazines in the racks with naked ladies and sexual whatever and there’s a market for that. There’s also a market for Time and Newsweek and Ebony and Jet too. There’s a market for tabloids and there’s a market for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times-type papers too.”

“This is about expanding the market,” Jackson said. “We’re not really competing with people who do (tabloid TV).”

If he’d been on the air last week, he said, he would have devoted at least a half hour to the Salvadoran civil war. He would have had a representative of the rebels, the government, the church and the Bush Administration on the program in an effort to negotiate some kind of solution on the show.

“Voices locked out,” Jackson said. “Not just voices in this country. In fact, we may change the name to ‘Voices of the World’ because we might not limit ourselves to voices in America. There are voices all over who don’t get heard.”