The ratings for Bill Wattenburg’s night-time talk show “The Open Line To The West Coast” on KGO Radio (ABC), San Francisco, have been three to four times above the average of the next best-rated shows (AM and FM) in the market for at least the last eleven years running (since 1982). His show gains 11 to 20 shares in his time slot compared to 3 to 4 shares for his closest competitors. He has been a regular on KGO talk radio since 1972. His nighttime radio shows reach the entire west coast from Alaska to Mexico, as he announces when he comes on the air. Based on his Bay Area audience ratings, we estimate that at least 1,200,000 in the eleven western states and Alaska hear some part of each of his three-hour, 10 pm to 1 am KGO shows on weekends. We estimate that at least 13,000,000 on the west coast have listened to him at some time in the last three years on radio and recognize his name or his voice. Out-of-market numbers say that his total listening audience in southern California is substantially larger than in the Bay Area in the 10 pm to 12 pm time slot.
Our staff evaluated tapes of sixteen of his KGO Radio shows and three of his TV shows picked at random for the period January 1988 to December 1992. He allowed us to observe him in-studio during four of his live KGO radio talk shows in October 1992. A recent feature story on his KGO radio performances appeared in the Capitol Cities/ABC employee magazine. We believe this to be a fair analysis of his radio performances.
[I can not include the story from the employee magazine (ABC Ink), since ABC does not grant copyright clearances for this internal publication. But here is an abstract of the article:
Wattenburg usually begins his broadcast sessions with the “authority of a likable professor with a soothing baritone voice”, but during the show he will switch from that to fierce accusations against anything or anyone he considers idiotic, then switch back to the professor mode to help young kids calling in with homework or science questions.
He began his media career in 1971–1972 doing the talk-show circuit (both TV and radio) under the pen name Will Harvey, author of “How to Find and Fascinate a Mistress”, and this exposure led KGO Radio to have him host a few Sunday talk radio programs, drawing on his scientific knowledge and experience as a nuclear weapons designer to discuss the many controversies of the weapons and of nuclear power. Except for a brief stint doing a weekly TV series, he’s been with the station ever since.
These two passages perhaps best describe his philosophy about talk radio:
When they see Bill Wattenburg’s ratings, many ask why other talk show hosts don’t follow his format by welcoming all callers on any subject. He shrugs off the subject with: “If you do, you’d better be ready to spend three hour on the air admitting your ignorance. You’d better be prepared for what smart people will ask you.”
…
Some of his strongest critics admit that they are compelled to listen to him because they can’t afford not to know what sort of wild scheme or political assault he will come up with next that will be in the Monday morning papers.
We picked up some sour notes however, from one KGO Radio producer who has been with the station for many years. This producer said that Wattenburg almost never takes guests on his show and that he ignores advice from producers who offer him important material and topics for his shows. We asked this producer to give us an example. The producer mentioned that Wattenburg ignored some news stories during the Gulf War that reported the danger of nuclear material being scattered all over the desert, or that the Iraqis could have retrieved a nuclear warhead and used it against us. We asked the producer if he/she knew that Wattenburg was probably very familiar with the safeguards on our nuclear weapons because he worked on the design of nuclear weapons at one time and was an advisor to the Air Force. The producer said that he/she did not know that Wattenburg had ever done that.
As to the second complaint—no guests on his shows—we politely asked if anyone could explain why Wattenburg’s ratings were more than twice as high as the top-rated daytime KGO shows that specialized in interviewing guests booked on the shows by producers. The answer we got was that it was easier for him to hold high ratings in the nighttime slot at 10 pm to 1 am than during the daytime. We pointed out that all the other major radio shows on the west coast in the same time slot had much lower ratings that Wattenburg. And, we asked why Wattenburg still had higher ratings when he did the KGO daytime shows in the seventies.
The last response we were offered by this senior producer was: “Well, he’s been around for twenty years, you know. All the rednecks listen to him.”
Another KGO producer who works Wattenburg’s shows commented that some of the older KGO producers don’t like Wattenburg just because he won’t take guests that they try to book on his shows. “They get a lot of flak from their public relations friends in New York who want to book authors on Wattenburg’s shows. Wattenburg won’t take even his own best friends on his shows. Why should he take theirs?…. The younger producers here fight to work Wattenburg’s shows. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s sort of satisfying. And it’s a snap…. He tells us to take every caller who calls on his show. We get a lot of really bright young kids who call his show late at night. He gets a little mad if you even refuse to let a drunk on his show. He says a lot of drunks make more sense than the sober ones, and people love to hear them on the air because if you work them right they will tell the whole world the truth that they will be sorry about tomorrow…. It’s sort of nice to start a show when the switchboard is already full of calls before he goes on the air…our biggest problem is when people start to call before the end of the previous show and only want to know if Wattenburg is going to be there later. The host on that show gets mad at you if he is pleading for callers and he sees calls coming in, but none of them are for him…”
We verified that Wattenburg started and promoted two major environmental campaigns on his radio shows. These were: stopping the giveaway of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to foreign-owned (Japanese) interests, and saving the old-growth redwoods in the Headwaters Forest owned by Pacific Lumber Company.
He began alerting his west coast audience to these dangers in 1989, well before national environmental organizations were on the bandwagon. He first warned that the takeover of Pacific Lumber by a Houston investor in a junk bond deal would lead to the cutting of the last of the privately-owned virgin redwoods. State and federal officials didn’t believe him until Pacific Lumber’s new owners filed for a logging permit the next year. Major public campaigns and legislation have since stopped the cutting for the near future.
For two years, Wattenburg’s audience bombarded congress with protests over the fifty-year contracts given to foreign-owned lumber companies to cut the virgin forests in the Tongass Forest for as little as a few dollars a tree. Most members of congress admitted that they didn’t even know that this country’s largest national forest existed, let alone where it was. Wattenburg’s favorite ploy was to remind politicians that they were hypocrites for complaining about the cutting of rain forests in other countries while they allowed the clear-cutting of this country’s only temperate rain forest.
The U.S. Forest Service finally modified the contracts extensively in 1992 and set aside large areas in the Tongass that can not be cut. Wattenburg still delights in reminding the environmental lobbies that they only later got interested in this problem to get contributions to save a forest that was actually rescued by his audience on KGO Radio.
This page was last modified on .
TOC |