Politics Dominate Black Stations : Chicago’s Talk Radio Dial Split Along Racial Lines

CHICAGO —  To grasp the depth of racial polarization in their town, all Chicagoans need do is tune in Monday night to an unusual radio program.

Only hours before polls open in Tuesday’s mayoral election, two competing radio stations--one with a predominantly white audience and the other heavily black--will simulcast a call-in show to unite their listeners for the first time over the airwaves.

Although conceived as an effort to ease community tensions, the broadcast also serves as a stark reminder that Chicagoans split along racial lines not only in where they live and how they vote but even in what they listen to on the radio.

“Chicago’s radio stations are as segregated as the city,” acknowledged Chris Berry, executive editor of WBBM-AM, the CBS-owned news radio station that has teamed up for the simulcast with WGCI-AM, a talk station that caters to a black audience.

The color barrier in the nation’s third-largest city, where whites and blacks each make up about 40% of the population, has spawned a kind of sound barrier as well. Whites largely rely on one set of stations for their information and entertainment and blacks, many distrustful of mainstream media, turn to their own stations.

Arbitron ratings from last fall provide vivid proof of such audio separation. Blacks and Latinos composed only 6% of the audience of top-rated WGN, an all-talk station owned by the Chicago Tribune, according to the survey. By contrast, those two groups made up 91% of the listeners at the No. 2 station in the market. It features a black music format.

The phenomenon, also found in New York, Washington and other major urban centers, has triggered a surge in popularity and influence of black-oriented radio stations. In turn, activists have exploited that growing power to orchestrate support for black political causes and candidates.

Black stations proved instrumental in electing the late Harold Washington, this city’s first black mayor. And currently, the two major black talk stations have embarked on a virtual crusade on behalf of Timothy Evans, the black City Council member who is waging an independent campaign for mayor against Democrat Richard M. Daley and Republican Edward R. Vrdolyak, who are both white.

“If you listen to WGCI now or WVON (another black talk station) you would almost suggest that those shows ought to be listed as part of the campaign contribution for Tim Evans,” said Alton Miller, Washington’s former press secretary.

Rumormongers, Bigots

Critics say the stations often drop all pretense of objectivity and have allowed themselves to become conduits for rumormongers and bigots. “On a typical morning, you will hear about the white media conspiracy, the white political conspiracy, the white economic conspiracy and all the other forms of white skulduggery being used to deprive blacks of their fair and just claim to the mayor’s office,” complained influential newspaper columnist Mike Royko in a recent article.

The intensity of anti-white rhetoric has mushroomed under the pressure cooker of another bitter fight for control of City Hall. Guests and callers to both stations regularly lambaste Daley as a racist, exhort blacks to vote for their own and accuse Chicago’s mainstream media of distorting campaign coverage and poll results to help recapture power for whites.

On WGCI last week, morning host Ty Wansley speculated with listeners about whether local newspapers might be trying to hurt Evans by frequently printing pictures of him with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a Chicago resident who is unpopular with many whites here.

Callers Fume About Column

At WVON, callers fumed about the Royko column even though he had never mentioned that station. Did he single out WGCI for criticism, they wondered, as part of a twisted plot to increase its standing in the black community and help lure listeners from WVON, the city’s pioneer black-owned radio outlet? Despite its format and black management, WGCI is owned by whites.

Talk-radio activism is nothing new, of course, nor is it confined to stations that appeal to black audiences. Only weeks ago, scores of radio programs across the country whipped up public outrage against a hefty pay raise for Congress, increasing pressure on lawmakers and eventually helping to scuttle the idea.

AM for Chatter

Because of their superior sound quality, FM stations by and large offer musical programming. AM frequencies, on the other hand, are thick with chatter, much of it coming from ideologues of all political stripes. Chicago, for example, was the last radio home of Morton Downey Jr. before he parlayed a deliberately cultivated reputation as a right-wing windbag into national celebrity with his own syndicated television show.

But the talk on black stations here has become particularly strident, with moderators functioning as unabashed cheerleaders for Evans.

Al Lerner, the popular co-host of a WGN talk show, said he would be fired if he came off as one-sided as his counterparts on WGCI and WVON or tolerated the kind of blatant racial appeals and comments that air on some black stations. Said Lerner: “The message that’s put out time and time again is ‘a black has to be mayor of Chicago . . . no matter what he does or says, you have to vote for the black guy.’ ”

WVON morning host Delmarie Cobb said critics do not understand that black talk stations are not trying to be clones of their white talk counterparts. Rather, she argued, they are seeking to fill a communications void for a community that has long felt either shut out or misrepresented by news coverage and discussion in white-dominated radio, newspapers and television.

“The purpose of it is to provide a forum for black people, a forum which they have never had before,” said Cobb, who served as Jackson’s press spokesman during his 1988 presidential campaign. “The only way blacks could get the message out prior to black talk radio was basically through churches.”

Indeed, while programs may include news, sports, weather, traffic and other trappings of the white talk stations, the talk inevitably steers to those issues on the front burner in the black community. And these days, that is clearly politics.

In essence, politics sells talk radio on black stations. “If we take politics out of talk radio, we would struggle to keep the kind of listening audience we want,” said Hoyett Owens, general manager at WVON. “That’s the hottest topic we have.”

The black stations spend hours rehashing details of political rallies, speeches and strategies that rate only a glancing notice on WGN or other mainstream stations. Jackson, Evans and a host of their political supporters are frequent guests, either in-studio or on the phone. Jackson even filled in as a co-host on WVON Thursday morning.

Daley and surrogates also turn up on occasion, usually fending off a barrage of hostile questions from listeners who clearly favor Evans.

Although the black talk format is a recent innovation, generations of blacks in Northern cities have been weaned on programming that promoted pride and development. Mark Newman, a black radio historian, said white station owners discovered decades ago that there was money to be made in black programming.

From the Depression into the 1950s, Newman said, black radio functioned largely as a social service agency, providing tips on legal rights, employment, personal counseling and where to get respectful treatment when shopping. One long-running program in Chicago helped reunite thousands of friends and relatives that had lost touch as they migrated north.

Political Muscle

As the black community in Chicago began to flex its political muscle, so did some of the programming. Music and religious programming was interspersed with commentaries from prominent activists who promoted community disillusionment with the old white-dominated Democratic machine.

By the early 1980s, black stations had helped organize a crippling boycott of a city-run summer festival and promoted major petition and voter registration drives that propelled Washington into the mayor’s office.

In 1986, WVON, one of seven black-oriented stations in the nearly 50-station Chicago metropolitan market, made the format switch from gospel music to talk. The motivation was as much commercial as political. Playing music, WVON, whose call letters stand for “Voice of the Negro,” hardly registered a blip in the ratings. By last year, it had moved up to 18th in the ratings despite a weak 1,000-watt signal, ahead of 50,000-watt AM stations owned by such major broadcast chains as ABC and Westinghouse.

Seeing profit potential, the Gannett Corp., a huge white-owned media conglomerate whose holdings include USA Today, raided some of WVON’s top talent and switched its faltering WGCI-AM from black music to talk last January. The timing--just as the 1989 mayoral race was hitting full stride--produced a volatile mix of rhetoric on both stations as they vied to portray themselves as the paramount voice of the black community.

Activist Format Spreads

Chicago may be the only city where black talk stations are battling head-to-head for listeners, but the format and some of the political activism that goes with it have spread to stations in other cities. New York’s WLIB has been actively involved in black voter registration and education drives and helped focus initial attention on the controversial Tawana Brawley case in which a black teen-age girl claimed to have been abducted and raped by a law enforcement officer and other whites.

Three years ago, Washington’s black-owned WOL helped organize a boycott of the Washington Post Sunday magazine after blacks complained that there were racist overtones in articles that it had published. And recently the station provided food, water, bedding, supplies and a lot of publicity for a group of Howard University students who staged an 89-hour takeover of a college building to protest the inclusion of Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater on the board of directors of the predominantly black institution. Atwater eventually resigned.

Despite complaints from some whites, WVON’s Owens sees nothing wrong with such broadcast boosterism. He lists the station’s drive to promote Harold Washington as one of its finest achievements. In fact, he insisted, the black political movement in Chicago would founder without support from black stations.

“I cannot imagine any black candidate running for citywide office that can accomplish it without us,” he said. “The white media’s just not going to give them coverage.”