Floridian: She'll always have radio

She'll always have radio

Dr. Laura has a loyal following for her radio show, heard locally from 9 to 11:30 a.m. on WFLA-AM 970.

By PAMELA DAVIS

Dr. Laura Schlessinger owes every bit of her success to radio listeners.

They're the ones who make her ratings soar. They're the ones who go out and "do the right thing." They're the ones who subscribe to her newsletter, read her newspaper column and purchase her books.

It just may be those same listeners who pick up their remote controls and make Dr. Laura's new TV show a success, too.

But if even no one tunes in to the Dr. Laura TV show debuting Monday on WFTS-Ch. 28, the marriage and family counselor will still have a broadcast home.

"She will have the radio show as long as she wants to. When people get to the level of Dr. Laura, the biggest competitor and threat to their well being is themselves," said Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, a trade publication. "If they start to take themselves too seriously, go off on a tangent or start to play to their core and not realize they have to play to a wider base, they can ruin themselves."

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is the No. 2 radio talk show in the country, behind the Rush Limbaugh Show. It is syndicated to more than 450 stations and has 18-million listeners.

So when she went on the air and said homosexuals are "biological errors," "deviants" and "dysfunctional," people heard her loud and clear.

Those remarks, gay groups say, breed intolerance. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination called for Paramount Television to cancel Dr. Laura's TV show, and numerous advertisers, including American Express and Procter & Gamble, have bailed from her radio program.

The 53-year-old Schlessinger has said her TV show, unlike her radio show, will include opposing viewpoints. She maintains she has "never made an anti-gay statement," only "anti-gay-activist-agenda commentaries."

Locally, the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show airs on WFLA-AM 970 from 9 to 11:30 a.m. with repeats on Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. It has been on the station since 1995, a year after the show went into syndication.

Although Schlessinger's numbers in the Tampa Bay area were low in the last Arbitron ratings period, WFLA attributes that more to her time slot than to listeners who disagree with her view on homosexuals.

"Our core audience tends to lean conservative. I doubt that they're terribly bothered by the comments that are being reported that she made," says WFLA operations manager Sue Treccase. "I think it would bristle some people, but the audience of a talk radio station, and this one in particular, are not in a large way going to be terribly offended by that."

Treccase says the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show lost listeners when it moved from afternoons to mornings. Schlessinger replaced Mark Larsen, a popular local host with an issues-oriented show, and WFLA's diehard listeners haven't forgiven the station for making the change.

Though Treccase sometimes receives e-mails from listeners saying Schlessinger is too strident and insensitive, she also hears from people who get ticked off when the show is temporarily off the air.

The Monday after Elian Gonzalez was taken from his Miami home, the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show was bumped in favor of a live local talk program discussing the issue. Treccase got a ton of complaint calls because Schlessinger wasn't on the air.

The latest stink isn't out of character for the radio host. From her base at KFI in Los Angeles, she talks endlessly about morality and traditional family values.

It's too soon to tell what impact the protests from gay and lesbian groups will have on Dr. Laura's radio show.

"It probably has helped it because talk radio thrives on controversy," Talkers magazine's Harrison says. "Though she may have lost a couple sponsors here and there, I'm sure the notoriety has brought her more than two for every one that she's lost."

From a professional standpoint, Schlessinger has had an impact on other talkers in the industry.

Local WFLA talk show host Glenn Beck says Schlessinger has given him courage to break out of the politically correct mode.

"For a long time, with morals and wanting to express my feelings on spirituality, I felt completely alone," Beck says. "Hearing Dr. Laura do it and be so successful at it, I realized I'm surrounded by a bunch of people who feel just like me. We're battling just to hang on to our families and to ourselves as decent people."

Schlessinger's show has also paved the way for more female on-air talent.

"In large measure she opened some doors for women in talk radio, which traditionally has been a male stronghold and still is," WFLA's Treccase says. "It's not just that she's on the radio doing a show; it's that she is as successful at it as she is."

Whether Schlessinger's harsh, no-nonsense advice and tough-love message will translate from radio to TV is anyone's guess. Unlike the Howard Stern and Don Imus television shows, which are nothing more than televised radio programs, Dr. Laura will be required to create an actual TV product.

Rush Limbaugh did well on television in the 1990s. His syndicated TV show aired for four years until he pulled the plug because he didn't like the time slots it had around the country.

"You can't look at someone and say, "They're very successful at radio, let's put him on TV.' They're completely different mediums," Beck says. "Look at how hard it is to translate from television to the big screen. Just because you're good on television doesn't mean you'll make it in films. It's even farther removed from radio to television."

Harrison, from Talkers magazine, says failure in television wouldn't necessarily hurt Schlessinger in radio.

"Though she'd be better off having not gone into TV if she's going to fail," he said. "Sometimes television takes away from the mystique. I can't say if failure for Dr. Laura on television will not harm her from one degree to another. It won't be good for her or her morale."