"SURVIVOR" SECRET: TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL

By Brad Kava, SJ Mercury News - Ear (column); Friday, August 25, 2000

Contact Brad Kava at bkava@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5040; fax (408) 271-3786.

You wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of Ken Berry's e-mail on Wednesday.

The program director at KGO-AM (810), the Bay Area's most listened-to radio station, has as many flames as a Montana forest, after he decided to release the results of the CBS television show "Survivor," three hours before people on the West Coast can see who wins.

"I have been overwhelmed," says the former news director, who was promoted to program director. "This is daunting. I have been called a weasel ... a jerk. It's kind of frightening because of the vehemence."

Berry's audience found out Tuesday on new afternoon host Pete Wilson's show that the station would make an early announcement, reporting the show's winner on East Coast time, sparking a debate that was hotly continued on Ronn Owens's morning show Wednesday.

Berry says he's covering this show as news, the same way he will cover the Sydney Olympics, where results will be in hours before they are available on prime time TV.

He planned to give listeners a warning for both events, letting them turn off the station if they didn't want to know who wins.

"We're a news operation," Berry says, appealing to my journalistic upbringing. "We report it when we know it."

If these weren't the dog days of summer and if the political conventions were less contrived or more interesting than "Survivor," none of us would be wasting time on this.

But if I'm in my car and I happen to accidentally hear the results before I get home, I'm going to want to harm someone. I'm going to wish the person who released the results was locked in a room with Richard, Rudy or Susan for a week.

KCBS-AM (740) coincidentally, they say, decided not to air the results until after 10 p.m. West Coast time.

It was only coincidence that his network has made a ton of money from the show and he is making this decision, says program director Ed Cavagnaro.

"We don't ordinarily hold back on news stories," says Cavagnaro. "But this is not hard news. It was done four months ago. This is feature news. Anyone who really cares will be watching anyway."

What Berry has done is like ruining the end of a movie or announcing who killed J.R. Although he says it would be no different if his network owned the show, I'm betting it would.

Berry says the ABC network will make the announcement in real time, so he has to. The CBS network isn't. I submit there is more politics and back stabbing here than in a Gore/Bush pot party.

Did ABC affiliate KGO report early when local Joe Trela won $1 million on its "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"? No, says Berry, because it wasn't as big a news event.

(The most amazing thing about "Survivor" is that even though about 100 people had known who won since April, no one spilled the beans. It refutes all those arguments about the Kennedy assassination, where people claim that if it had been a conspiracy, it couldn't have been kept a secret.)

Someone told me I shouldn't waste my time with "Survivor" or conservative talk radio. But I listen so you don't have to. And the two have many similarities. They are filled with small-minded, racist, misogynist, homophobes, such as Rudy.

This week Rush Limbaugh claimed that Al Gore was boosted in the polls because women were voting on emotion and they liked the way he kissed his wife at the Democratic convention.

His imitator, Michael Savage, who lifts his topics from the morning show, took it a step further, claiming that men were right to deny women the vote in the 1800s.

For a while I thought that if a Republican won the presidency, these folks might go away.

Now I realize, that would give them license to put on their white robes and spew the real venom they've been holding back.

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