Keeping All Kinds of Hope Alive

By Richard Zoglin

The guest list will not, in all probability, include any homosexual priests, women who fell in love with their rapists or people who have had mind- expanding encounters with UFOs. The show will air mostly in sober-minded Sunday time periods and deal with such unsensational topics as the plight of the poor and the future of the family farm. Yet TV's newest talk show could easily rival Oprah's or Geraldo's on the controversy front, largely because of its host. He's a newcomer to the TV gab circuit, if not to controversial gab on TV: Jesse Jackson.

The big question during the 1988 presidential race was, What does Jesse want? For the present at least, the answer is, To be a TV star. Early this month, Jackson made headlines (though not as many as he would have liked) when he traveled to Baghdad in the role of TV reporter to interview Saddam Hussein. Now he is about to get his own weekly TV forum.

Jesse Jackson, which debuts this weekend on 129 stations, will be something of a cross between Donahue and This Week with David Brinkley. Each hour will focus on one topic, opening with a taped report followed by a round-table discussion led by Jackson. A live studio audience will be on hand, and show- biz celebrities may appear occasionally. The program will feature other unconventional elements, including dramatic re-creations and newsmakers acting as reporters. On the first show, for example, Native American activist Russell Means will report on Indian living conditions from reservations around the country.

But what makes the show a unique, and potentially troubling, venture is the politically charged presence of Jackson himself. While asserting that the show will be "fair and balanced," the former Democratic presidential contender does not hide his advocacy goals. The show, he says, will not be "just reflecting and recording and research. We intend to communicate, to act, to make things happen." Says Michael Linder, who is producing the show along with music magnate Quincy Jones: "It's really rethinking what 'issues TV' is. We want to be subjective as well as objective."

Talk-show hosts with strong opinions are not uncommon on TV, but those with such clear political ambitions are pretty rare. The question of how nakedly Jackson will brandish his political agenda has caused concern among some show staff members as well as station executives. "A small amount of political involvement is inevitable," says Al DeVaney, general manager of WPWR, which is carrying the program in Chicago. "But we certainly don't want the show to turn into a soapbox for Jesse." Dick Robertson, president of Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution (owned by Time Warner Inc.), which is syndicating the show, insists that it will be balanced. "What we hope we will achieve is a forum for discussion," he says, "not a platform for political ideology."

What is uncertain is whether Jackson will fulfill that hope. The host-to-be has already surprised his producers by running for a "shadow Senate" seat from the District of Columbia, an unofficial post that would give Jackson a vehicle for lobbying for D.C. statehood. (Jackson won the Democratic primary and faces only token opposition in the Nov. 6 election.) That move has forced two important stations in Washington and Baltimore to keep his show off the air until after the balloting, to avoid any potential equal-time conflicts.

Jackson obviously sees the show as a way of staying in the public eye while contemplating his next political move. For a model, he need look no further than former President Ronald Reagan, who kept hope alive during the interregnum between the California governorship and the White House by doing radio commentary. Jackson's advisers hope the show will present a "cooler" Jesse Jackson than the image viewers usually get. "Most people only know Jesse from a 20-to-30-second snippet of a speech, where he's near a crescendo," says longtime aide Frank Watkins. "In TV terms he's 'hot,' and he scares the bejesus out of white people."

Jackson sees no conflict between his dual role as TV journalist and partisan political figure. "I'm a communicator," he says. "I'm a public servant, and some of my missions are journalistic." But news executives are more dubious. When Jackson tried to line up a TV backer for his recent Middle East trip, he was turned down by all three major networks and several other news organizations (including Warner Bros. TV), before the magazine show Inside Edition ponied up $125,000. The interview was something of a bust, partly because CBS's Dan Rather got to Saddam first and partly, according to Inside Edition producers, because the sharpest exchanges were deleted by Iraqi officials.

In his new guise as TV journalist, Jackson will have to prove that he can elicit the opinions of others and not just expound on his own. He will, moreover, have to demonstrate that his TV platform is not simply a political launching pad. Does Jackson consider his new bully pulpit a key to the White House? "I see this as a key to all houses," he replies. "Everybody's house will see this." Sounds suspiciously like a yes.

With reporting by Michael Riley/Washington and William Tynan/New York