Clinton Talks, but Who Listens? : Radio: Local execs say President's five-minute address is not compelling enough to interrupt programming.

By CLAUDIA PUIG

Oct. 23, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Gaspar Cisneros Barnette has voted Republican for the better part of 60 years, but he would still like to listen to President Clinton’s weekly radio broadcasts in his San Fernando Valley home.

There’s just one problem: None of the 80 radio stations in the Los Angeles-Orange County area carries the five-minute program.

Clinton’s radio address to the public emanates from the Oval Office each Saturday and is offered live via satellite to local stations at 7:05 a.m. The topics cover whatever is on the President’s mind that week, and his comments sometimes produce news.

“Obviously, L.A. is the second biggest city in the country and an important city overall, and I think it’s a shame he’s not heard there,” said Richard Strauss, White House radio services coordinator. “I don’t understand it. It’s a great opportunity for the President to reach out and communicate directly to the American people. He doesn’t have that many opportunities to do that other than the State of the Union address.”

Strauss said that the broadcast can be heard in nearly all of the country’s major cities, including Ventura (KVEN-AM) and San Diego (KSDO-AM).

He said he receives about 20 calls and letters a week from Los Angeles-area residents, such as Barnette, who hear about the program and are frustrated because they can’t listen to it.

“It’s incomprehensible to me,” Barnette said. “It’s not a matter of politics. It’s a matter of keeping the public in touch with what our government is doing.”

Strauss said the White House has called several local stations to persuade them to carry Clinton’s commentaries. Contacted by The Times, executives at those stations said they monitor the broadcast and excerpt portions they consider newsworthy, but most said that the full address is not compelling enough to justify interrupting regularly scheduled programming.

“It’s really not a political decision,” said Chris Claus, general manager of all-news KFWB-AM (980). “We didn’t take it when (President Ronald) Reagan was doing it either. . . . We simply do the news and nothing but. If he says anything moderately interesting in his address, we might pick that up and run it. But usually all he gets into is the same old rhetoric.”

“My decision not to carry Clinton’s address was not a Republican versus Democrat decision,” said Diane Cridland, program director of talk station KABC-AM (790). “It’s strictly a matter of programming. It cuts into the ‘Ken and Barkley Company’ program--the Saturday special. At the time that it’s aired it would be an interruption to the normal program.”

Strauss said that stations elsewhere that run up against similar programming constraints often choose to tape the broadcast and air it at a more convenient time.

All-news station KNX-AM (1070) has occasionally run the full address on a tape-delay basis, news director Bob Sims said. But he said his primary concern is with the balance of news coverage. A five-minute rebuttal to the address is offered by the Republican party, also via satellite.

“If you’re going to carry Clinton’s address, then you have an obligation to offer a similar opportunity to those who disagree,” Sims said. “It would open the doors to 10 minutes of programming that most stations in Los Angeles are reluctant to commit themselves to.”

Sims added that since neither his station nor any other commercial station here carried Reagan’s or George Bush’s weekly addresses when they were President, to pick up Clinton now would appear to be playing political favorites.

“It would defy precedent and people could complain, ‘You do this now but you didn’t do this with Reagan or Bush,’ ” Sims said.

One station that did carry the Reagan commentaries was non-commercial KCRW-FM (89.9), which paired them with a Democratic rebuttal that the station produced itself. But the Santa Monica-based outlet did not run Bush and does not broadcast Clinton.

“I never thought it was appropriate to run just the President, no matter who the President was,” said KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour. But running both the address and the rebuttal “is an enormous amount of work. First, you have to record the President, then record the Republicans. Then you have to find time to put it on. That’s a day’s work. If somebody would give me a grant so I could hire somebody to put the whole enchilada on the air, I’d do it.”

At talk-station KFI-AM (640), general manager Howard Neal said no one has ever called or written asking that the station carry the broadcast. “I think we capture the highlights from it in our newscasts,” he said, adding that the weekly address is available to the public on C-SPAN cable-TV channel.

Of all the stations contacted by The Times, only KUSC-FM (91.5), a public radio station that plays mostly classical music, said it would consider running the address.

“Initially, I thought that it didn’t fit our format and (that) our Saturday mornings were pretty full up,” general manager Wallace A. Smith said.

“But even though I haven’t made the decision to run it, I’ve sort of left the door open. My rationale for doing it would be that it is part of public radio’s responsibility to the community to offer programming that no one else offers.”