The Right Rush-es Onward : The talk of the ’94 election was the Limbaugh-led revolution. Well, in 1996, conservatives are turning up the volume even louder. Where’s the opposing view? That’s what liberals are asking.

Mornings you can hear Bill Handel on KFI-AM, decrying the notion “that somehow illegal aliens should have the benefits of education and health care, and the right to work in this state. . . . ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme’--and you pay for it. That’s right, America, you pay for these Mexicans and Hondurans and El Salvadorans and Guatemalans who come up over the border.”

Afternoons there is Dennis Prager of KABC-AM, attacking what he calls affirmative action “quotas” that California’s Democratic Party is using in compiling its delegation to the party’s 1996 national convention. It’s one of the reasons, he declares, that “I am asking people to vote Republican. . . . So often it is the people who sound so much more tolerant and open [who] will have really destructive ideas for the civilization.”

And at night, at least until last Monday, you could tune in to Bob Heckler, a host who can devote two hours to a Southern-based movement to secede from the United States, while asserting: “We know we need a more conservative America in order to get our values back again, but the Democrats won’t let go because they believe that Big Brother can do it better.” (Heckler moved from KABC to sister station KMPC-AM, where he now talks from 9 a.m. to noon.)

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With the coming long march of caucuses, primaries, conventions, campaigns and debates leading to the election finale in November, talk radio is alive with the sound of politics. Actually, like perpetual political campaigns, it never really stopped.

So, with just 281 candidate-shopping days left to decide on the presidency and the control of Congress, what is the state of political talk radio in Southern California?

On KABC-AM (790), KFI-AM (640) and KMPC-AM (710), in prime weekday slots, the regular hosts on issues-oriented programs are all male, a shade more minority than two years ago and preponderantly conservative. In the tricky arena of political labeling, there’s not only Rush Limbaugh conservative but libertarian conservative, neoconservative and an angry conservatism of those espousing a dogma that the best government is that which governs least--if at all. Though the hosts are hardly conservative on every issue or even discuss politics all the time, a rightward tone and emphasis prevails.

With the high-profile exception of 29-year KABC veteran Michael Jackson (whose 9 a.m.-noon show airs opposite Limbaugh’s on KFI) and Tom Leykis (whose 3-7 p.m. syndicated show is heard on KMPC), there are no apparent liberals at major station microphones Monday through Friday.

With talk radio no longer the phenomenon it was at the time of the Republican revolution of 1994, political and media experts are taking a harder look at how much effect its conservative bent will have on this year’s campaigns. While there is considerable argument over the actual persuasiveness of talk radio, there is also the fear in some quarters that a lack of balance skews debate.

“The problem I have with talk radio [is that] it’s largely one-sided,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “Ideally in a democracy, you hear the other side. And even if you continue to hold your position, you become more tolerant of [the other side’s] existence, and you engage it on the assumption that it’s legitimate. A medium that simply reinforces one side doesn’t increase the likelihood of ultimately getting compromise.”

KABC’s Prager, citing what he considers a liberal tilt to the national press and network TV, dismisses such concerns: “I’ll make a trade with liberals,” he says. “You give us the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; ABC, NBC and CBS--and we’ll give you the talk shows.”

In Los Angeles as around the nation, talk radio leans conservative for two reasons: (1) The audience for it is perceived to be conservative, and (2) Limbaugh, whose phenomenal success helped revive the format and spawned a generation of copycats. In 1989, there were 350 news/talk stations; today there are nearly 1,200, and Limbaugh is on 650 of them. No wonder that after the GOP took control of Congress in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, the incoming Republican freshmen partied with Limbaugh, whom they made an honorary member of their class.

Until recently, KFI was deemed more conservative than KABC. Already the local outlet for Limbaugh, the station in 1992 replaced Leykis with former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates (who lasted 15 months) and then recruited the self-styled “fiercely independent” John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, whose “The John & Ken Show” (3-7 p.m.) became a prime vehicle for talking up the 1994 “Three Strikes You’re Out” anti-crime initiative.

Now the most-conservative title may belong to KABC. Last summer, the station bounced liberal lawyer Gloria Allred from weekday afternoons to weekends, gave the noon-1 p.m. hour of Jackson’s show to Prager and replaced Ira Fistell in the 11 p.m.-4 a.m. slot with the more conservative Art Bell.

“In some sense, I think the [point] is not why KABC has gotten conservative but noting that it was really the last to go,” says USC law professor Susan Estrich, campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis and a KABC weekend host. “A lot of the energy in politics is on the conservative side, and that’s being led by--and in turn reflected in--talk radio. The conventional wisdom right now is that that’s where the ratings are.”

“The talent’s on the conservative side,” maintains former KFI weekend host Hugh Hewitt, a conservative commentator on KCET-TV Channel 28’s nightly “Life & Times.” “Program directors, whether David G. Hall [of KFI] or George Green [general manager of KABC and KMPC], want talent plus interesting subject matter. It may be [that] everything on the left . . . is merely an echo or sounds so throaty. It just gets so old. . . .”

In the most recent Arbitron ratings book, from fall 1995, KFI was in third place, KABC was tied for 12th and KMPC was tied for 32nd. Much further down the list in the 86-station Los Angeles market is KIEV-AM (870), a small station in Glendale that is the home of conservatives George Putnam and Ray Briem. KLSX-FM (97.1) prides itself on being talk-lite.

Minority hosts on the three major talk stations are also Republican or conservative: Larry Elder on KABC (3-7 p.m.), an African American, and Xavier Hermosillo on KMPC (7-9 p.m.), chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of California, who likes to take jabs at “West Holly-weird.”

Liberals or the left-leaning are stuck in weekend slots: On KABC, Allred (7-9 p.m. Sunday) and Estrich (10 a.m.-noon Sunday), who says she wouldn’t want a weekday slot because she is busy raising her two young children. And on KFI, there’s Bill Press, chairman of the California Democratic Party (noon-3 p.m. Sundays) and Tammy Bruce, chair of Los Angeles’ chapter of the National Organization for Women (3-6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays).

Bruce, who touts herself as “the only open lesbian in mainstream talk radio,” notes that weekends are particularly hard for finding an audience. “Also--and that’s what I’ve had to adjust to--[stations] need it to be light.”

The paucity of liberal talk show hosts extends throughout the country, although its small band now includes Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York, with a syndicated weekend show on about 40 stations, and Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., California’s former governor. Brown, who was unable to find an outlet on the major commercial stations here, began airing this month on public station KPFK-FM (90.7) (4-5 p.m. weekdays); Cuomo isn’t heard in Los Angeles.

“Liberal hosts may not be as raucous and as entertaining,” Cuomo concedes. “For those who enjoy watching wrestling, fencing will never do.”

Will this conservative stance matter in the political campaigns of 1996? Among experts, you can get as much debate and nuance of opinion as you can at candidate forums.

“If Rush Limbaugh is so powerful,” argues Randall Bloomquist, news/talk editor of the trade paper Radio & Records, “then how come Bill Clinton is president? What these [radio] guys do is preach to the choir.

“The vast majority of people will not listen to a talk show host for any length of time they are not comfortable with,” he says. “Radio is a personal medium; talk show hosts are like friends. Their power is strictly defined by what the public thinks. They are most powerful riding the wave, surfing the wave, in the direction the public is already going.”

What talk radio can do, Bloomquist explains, is “take widely held visceral feelings, concentrate it into a beam, shoot it out like a laser and hit Capitol Hill with it.”

It’s also a “hook” for other media, he says: “Come next fall, President Clinton or his Republican opponent makes a little faux pas, and [reporters] all go to the talk radio station and watch the little needles go up and down. ‘Today at KABC, calls flooded. . . .’ ”

But Allred argues that there is a need for diverse political voices. “The lack of progressive radio talk show hosts may tend to lead people to believe that progressive thought is dying, that they’re alone in it.” For example, she says, “I think it matters that conservative hosts would [use the term] ‘illegal aliens’; I would call them ‘undocumented workers.’ ”

Ron Kobayashi, a jazz musician from Tustin and an activist in the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who as a member of FAIR in 1992 picketed KFI for letting Leykis go, acknowledges that stations have the right to espouse whatever views they want.

“But we have an election coming and they’re using the public airwaves,” he says. “It’s completely irresponsible . . . to have only one side presented. It’s incumbent upon them to have some sort of balance.”

Bill Press says both his station, KFI, and KABC have “always been committed to that. If they have Pete Wilson on, they’d have Kathleen Brown on.”

Still, Jerry Brown dismisses radio’s overall impact: “It’s not big enough. If Michael Huffington [had] just talked on talk radio, he wouldn’t have come as close to [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein. You have to buy prime-time advertising.”

Kobylt of KFI’s “John & Ken” agrees that talk radio’s influence is overestimated. “If you unplugged all the radio transmitters tomorrow,” he says, “I don’t think the political outcomes would be any different. Do you think . . . die-hard Rush fans would have voted any differently [in 1994] if [he] didn’t exist?”

Yet David Horowitz, director of the conservative Center for the Study of the Popular Culture, calls Limbaugh “the most important conservative since Ronald Reagan,” because he has “educated a whole generation on the issues.”

Radio hosts have had an effect. Hugh Hewitt credits “John & Ken” with skewering state attorney general candidate Tom Umberg, a Democrat, on the three-strikes issue (he lost), and with “putting a pitchfork” into GOP U.S. Senate candidate Huffington by attacking his wife, Arianna, on the nanny issue and her involvement in what some called a spiritual cult.

And Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, points out that talk radio “galvanizes populist conservatives--it certainly was one of the forces that made the 1994 turnout more disproportionately conservative than in past elections.”

Cuomo, acknowledging that his gubernatorial defeat last year was a result of talk radio marshaling a huge turnout of Upstate conservatives in congressional races--”the turnout killed me”--says that nonconservatives learned a lot. “You’ll see President Clinton using talk radio a lot more successfully [in 1996],” he says. “He’s better at it than anybody.”

Indeed, there is already evidence that the lesson has been learned. With Clinton’s decision to send American troops to monitor peacekeeping in Bosnia, administration officials fanned out over the nation’s airwaves with military precision.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt months ago hired New York radio producer Fred Clarke to get Gephardt and other Democratic representatives on the air.

Gene Burns, president of the National Assn. of Radio Talk Show Hosts, notes: “I remember Fred saying to me, ‘One of my principal jobs will be to convince the Democrats they have to be available. Just because you believe [talk radio] may be dominated by conservative Republicans, don’t be afraid of the medium.’ ”

Managers of talk radio stations insist that it is in just this way that political balance is achieved--by callers taking on the host.

“If Dennis Prager or Michael Jackson or Larry Elder, whomever--if they don’t allow the opposite viewpoint and the chance to be heard, we go right to their throat,” says KABC/KMPC’s Green.

To which Kohut of the Pew Research Center laughs. “Baloney,” he says. “We’ve done some [national] surveys of callers. They’re more conservative than the hosts, with some exception.”

Allred zeros in on the host’s power: “What they say is very important because they are the host. And they can say it for as long as they want to say it.”

Prager says that if he didn’t hear from callers that his show changed minds, “I would quit.”

‘America is tired of all the bull----, of the liberal nature of the government, of the bureaucracy. Americans want to stamp out crime. . . . The death penalty can be a deterrent. . . . Affirmative action programs have worked, but at this point we should be moving away [from them]. . . . It’s time for us to balance our budget, to manage our state and federal government like we manage our families.”

Rush Limbaugh? Dennis Prager? Xavier Hermosillo? No, that’s George Green, general manager of KABC and KMPC, chatting in his office on South La Cienega Boulevard about his own views--and denying that sharing his opinions is a prerequisite to getting hired there.

“We don’t pick [hosts] based on their politics,” Green declares, “[but rather] on their ability to entertain and inform. It just so happens that, in our quest for the best personalities . . . there is a movement to the right.

“Statistics indicate that the listener level on talk radio is at least 2-1 [conservative],” he says. “I’ve seen figures even more so. All talk radio, all across America.” If Green were only interested in promulgating his viewpoint, he notes, “Michael Jackson wouldn’t have been here all these years.”

Al Brady Law, operations manager for the two stations, which are owned by Capital Cities/ABC, says that conservative hosts are more entertaining. As he read somewhere, he says, “liberals were brought up to be polite and conservatives aren’t. My experience has been that a lot of liberals tend to be more tolerant of opposing viewpoints. Like Michael [Jackson].” He says he and Green actually have encouraged Jackson to “take more of a stand, don’t be so much in the middle.”

At KFI, program director David Hall goes even further in denying the connection between ideology and hiring. Except for Limbaugh, he insists, his station is not about politics. “We talk about the issues people really care about,” he says, claiming not to know whether his audience is liberal or conservative.

Hall, a self-described moderate, says talk radio moved right because Limbaugh created a “pack mentality.”

“After Rush really took off,” he says, “ . . . I started getting tapes and resumes from guys pitching themselves as ‘just like Rush.’ Lots of these guys are working--none of them here.”

KFI’s most recent weekday liberal was Stephanie Miller, whose 7-9 p.m. show aired from January 1994 until last June, when she left to do a syndicated late-night TV show (recently canceled). Though her outlook was essentially humorous, she talked about what she calls “the mean-spiritedness of the far right, among politicians and radio hosts.” After Limbaugh signed to be an orange juice spokesman, Miller urged listeners to pour their orange juice down the drain.

According to Hall, Jerry Brown’s show “doesn’t fit KFI.” And Cuomo is “New York--and this is Los Angeles, a pretty self-centered city.”

Is Limbaugh Los Angeles? No, Hall says, but he “talks about things that relate to everybody.”

Murray Fromson, director of the School of Journalism at USC, calls much of the political talk on radio “caveman politics.”

“They scream and try to get the most provocative people on air,” he says. “The shouting level in this country has gotten louder and louder, and I think a lot of it has to do with talk radio. . . . Whatever happened to civil discourse?”

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Times researcher Mary Edwards contributed to this article.