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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Document//EN"
+  "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0/oebdoc1.dtd">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/x-oeb1-document; charset=utf-8" />
+<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/x-oeb1-css" href="DrBillBio.css" />
+<title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: Talk Radio on the West Coast</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+<h1>Talk Radio on the West Coast</h1>
+
+<p>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, 10pm to 1am 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 10pm to 12pm time slot.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>[The story from the employee magazine, <i>ABC Ink</i>, is not included here because
+ABC does not grant permission for this content to be reproduced electronicly, but it is quite
+interesting.—PKS]</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 10pm to 1am 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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…”</p>
+
+<p><b>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.</b></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
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