Stations’ Strategy in Covering Briefings : Radio: KNX airs them in full; KFWB broadcasts only first portion, claiming a ‘lapse into repetition.’

Southern California’s two major radio news stations have adopted different policies toward covering the daily military briefings from Riyadh and the Pentagon about the war with Iraq. KNX-AM (1070) is covering them in full, while KFWB-AM (980) has chosen to broadcast only the first portion of them.

“What we have found is after the first few minutes and first few questions, the briefings lapse into repetition and such responses as ‘that’s tactical’ or ‘speculation’ or ‘I’m not able to comment on that,’ ” Bill Yeager, KFWB’s program director, explained Tuesday.

So the station airs the beginning of the briefings and then dumps out of them to supply a summary of the day’s news.

When Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney conduct the briefing, however, KFWB carries them in their entirety, Yeager noted.

“Schwarzkopf and Powell aren’t afraid to speculate,” he said.

Yeager also said that KFWB’s strategy stemmed at least in part from the fact that he had never seen “such tight censorship” of information.

CBS-owned KNX, meanwhile, from the outset of the war has aired all of the military briefings in full, even though dumping commercials to carry them--especially during the morning rush hour, when the station has its largest audience--is costly.

“I think the best information that we are getting each day is either announced or confirmed in these briefings,” said Robert Sims, KNX news director. “Additionally, I think the questions are interesting. In many ways, the reporters in Saudi Arabia are acting as surrogates for our listeners, asking their own questions for them, and I think it is useful to hear the official response, even though it may be a lot of ‘I can’t talk about that.’ Often there is an explanation about why they can’t talk about it or why some piece of information is slow in coming that I think is valuable.”

“It’s all we got, kid,” concured Ruth Hirschman, general manager at KCRW-FM (89.9). KCRW also has elected to broadcast the military briefings in their entirety each day, although Tuesday, because President Bush’s press conference pushed back the start time of the Riyadh briefing, the station “mistakenly” failed to air it, she said.

“When you are committed to a story, one of the drawbacks is that you have to commit yourself to that repetition, and some days there is not a lot of news,” Hirschman said. “But you never know, some correspondent from the field could ask the Saudi general something and at that moment you get the big news break of the day.”

All three programmers agreed that interest in the war among the general public has dropped a bit after the initial few days of intense, edge-of-your-seat fascination with every new detail and will probably remain that way until a ground war begins.

Nevertheless, Sims said, “I still find it very difficult to turn away from these briefings, even when they are not very productive. And I have received a lot of calls saying thank you for not dumping out of them. This is surely one of the biggest, most important stories that has happened in generations. I don’t think it’s right to respond to some perceived sense that war has become routine or redundant.”