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To: Valpal1; ~Kim4VRWC's~; FresnoDA; jaded
For those who would rather skip the trial phase and jump directly to the execution, perhaps this informative file helpful.

Let's do lynch?

Amazing, the things you can find on the internet...

31 posted on 04/14/2002 10:08:46 AM PDT by MizSterious
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To: MizSterious;spectre;Amore;Travis McGee;BunnySlippers;Doughtyone;Hillary's Lovely Legs;Snow Bunny...

Roberts' rules of order

Talk-show host lets van Dam clips fall where they may

By John Wilkens
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

April 14, 2002

Molly from Ocean Beach is on the line and she's not happy. "You are making money off the murder of Danielle van Dam," she said to Rick Roberts. "That's all you care about."

The comments don't seem to faze Roberts. He's heard worse in the two months since he began using his local talk-radio show to raise sharp questions about the activities of the slain girl's parents.

What had been whispers and water-cooler gossip exploded into the open with his show. Some people started focusing as much on Brenda and Damon van Dam as they did on David Westerfield, the neighbor charged with kidnapping and killing the 7-year-old Sabre Springs girl.

By arguing that the partying parents had indirectly put Danielle in harm's way, Roberts was accused of compounding the family's grief. Critics likened him to someone who blames a rape victim for wearing a short skirt.

He said he got death threats and his bosses at KFMB received calls for his firing. About 90 percent of the response early on ran against him, he said.

But with that came the kind of buzz that's golden to talk-show hosts. His disclosures got mentioned in media outlets from The Globe to Newsweek. He went on "20/20 Downtown" and Court TV.

His own show, "The Court of Public Opinion," had so many callers some were on hold for more than two hours. People started phoning in 20 minutes before each four-hour broadcast just to get in line. His ratings went up 35 percent, according to the station's program director.

In recent weeks, the focus has shifted at times to other issues, but it always snaps back to the van Dams, and no doubt will lock on them again during upcoming court proceedings.

These days, Roberts said, the feedback on the case favors him, especially since some of the lifestyle issues he raised were verified during Westerfield's preliminary hearing. People are calling to thank him for "having the courage to tell the real story."

"If ours was a civilized world," one man gushed on the air recently, "you would be king." Roberts said about 90 percent of the callers now support him.

Molly from Ocean Beach isn't one of them.

She told Roberts he lacks compassion and that his primary motivation is ratings. "Profit, that's all you're about, Rick, and that's clear to anyone who's listening."

Roberts didn't flinch. "Sweetheart," he rumbled in a gravelly voice so distinctive it gets him recognized three or four times a day out in public, "I do everything for ratings. There's nothing wrong with ratings. When I get ratings, it means I am doing my job."

Many talk-show entertainers have a gimmick, a trademark routine that separates them from their competitors. For the 48-year-old Roberts, it's reading the names and neighborhoods of convicted sex offenders on the air every week.

He started doing it in Kansas City in 1994, then in Dallas and now in San Diego, where, even with his recent boost, he trails Roger Hedgecock in the afternoon drive-time ratings.

"If somebody has a rabid dog, there's a notice posted to warn the neighbors," he said. "I think our children deserve at least the same kind of protection." He gets the names from public records.

Roberts' interest in sex criminals stemmed from his radio work on missing children. He said he dealt with several cases early in his career and grew angry when he realized many of the abductions were committed by repeat offenders.

His experience with these other cases came to play in the van Dam disappearance, he said. He didn't believe the details and time line as they were reported in the initial media accounts.

"The whole thing didn't make sense," he said.

Several days after Danielle vanished, Roberts said he got information from a law-enforcement source about the parents' activities. He said he agonized about whether he should go public with the details. Then "the van Dams made the decision for me."

They did that, he said, by holding press conferences in which they claimed, "This could happen to you the way it happened to us. We're just like anybody else."

The result, according to Roberts, was a community "frozen in fear," worried that a "clairvoyant child molester" would somehow find other kids and steal them away in the night, too.

"You can't go in front of the public like Ward and June Cleaver and say, 'Gee, we put Wally and the Beaver to bed at night and when we woke up the Beaver was missing,' not when you know it isn't true," Roberts said.

So, on Feb. 8, he put what he had learned on the air. He talked about wife-swapping and pot-smoking and parties in the garage.

At the time, Danielle was still missing and Westerfield had not yet been arrested. Roberts said his main concern was the safety of the other two children in the van Dam house.

Soon people from all over the county were going on his show to talk about the parents in all sorts of ways. They passed judgment on Brenda's makeup and Damon's body language. Any whiff of innuendo and suspicion got passed along relentlessly as the Roberts show became, in effect, "All Danielle, All the Time."

Talk radio, of course, is designed to be wide open. It's not journalism, as even Roberts will admit. Folks routinely come on and say just about anything they want.

Roberts said he trusts his listeners to separate the wheat from the chaff, that his main obligation is to keep the show balanced between callers who agree with him and those who don't.

"You have to remember it's the court of public opinion," he said, "not the court of law." If that means the occasional wacko gets through, he added, "well, they're entitled to their opinion, too."

His calls are screened by a producer who sits on the other side of a large plate-glass window. They're not screened very much – all the caller has to do is give a first name, city, and whether he or she agrees with the host – because Roberts wants whatever is going to happen to happen on the air.

But even some who are familiar with the brawling nature of the medium recoil when they hear the harsh scrutiny that's usually reserved for presidents and other public figures directed instead at the parents of a murdered child.

"For the sake of Danielle's memory and dignity, please stop all the rumors and gossip and settle down to decent conversation in this matter," a listener wrote in one of the milder notes posted on Roberts' KFMB Web site.

Others wade right in, however. The phone lines have been jammed. The Web site has had thousands of postings. Maybe that's because it's human nature when a child is slain for other people to search for answers – to grasp at reasons why the victim's family is so different the same tragedy couldn't possibly happen to you.

The Rick Roberts show offered people reasons in spades.

He said he has no regrets about his handling of the case.

"I feel bad for the parents," he said. "You have to. No one should have to suffer the pain and anguish that comes from losing a child. But there is an indirect responsibility that the parents ought to fess up to."

The van Dams declined to comment on Roberts. Susan Wintersteen, who has helped coordinate volunteer efforts for the family, said the talk show "is doing a great disservice" to the community.

"Everybody in San Diego came together to search for Danielle," she said, "and now he's just tearing them apart."

She's not the only one with hard feelings. Roberts has had a falling out with Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was abducted from her Petaluma home in 1993 and murdered.

Klaas, who runs a foundation to curb crimes against children, has been a guest on Roberts' show over the years. He admits amusement at the host's weekly routine of reading the names and neighborhoods of sex offenders on the air.

But he doesn't like the way Roberts has "gone after the van Dams."

The two tangled recently on Court TV. What had been set up as a debate about the relevance of the parents' lifestyle degenerated into a shouting match.

Later that day, on his own show, Roberts was upset about the exchange. What bothered him most was being accused by Klaas of lacking empathy for the van Dams.

"Of course I feel sorry for the parents," said Roberts, himself a divorced single father raising two teens. "But don't ask me to suspend my intellect in the process."

He told his listeners that Klaas was "going to have to hit his head against a tree and get some common sense."

Klaas, in a phone interview the next day, said, "Law enforcement has said that none of the van Dams' choices had anything to do with the murder, but Rick Roberts just keeps going on and on about it.

"These people are in the depths of grief, down on the ground barely able to survive, and he's stomping on their heads and kicking them in the ribs. He should be absolutely ashamed of what he is doing."

He isn't.

"Let's face it," Rick Roberts said. "My main job is to keep people listening."

"I do everything for ratings. There's nothing wrong with ratings. When I get ratings, it means I am doing my job." rick roberts

Around the dial with Rick Roberts

Rick Roberts, 48, grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. His mother was disabled and his father wasn't around so he was raised by his grandparents, he said. He spent a couple of years in a boys home.

For a while he thought he would be a doctor, but chemistry overwhelmed him. He became a lawyer instead, specializing in oil and gas leases. He sometimes led educational seminars for other attorneys and at one of those somebody suggested he go into talk radio.

At the time, about 10 years ago, political talk shows were popular, thanks to Rush Limbaugh. But Roberts wanted to do a show that fed more off other news, a show that "asked the questions the guy in the car would ask if he could."

He started at KOA in Denver, an unusually big-league launching pad for a rookie. Then, in 1994, it was on to KCMO in Kansas City. He sparked controversy there for a two-hour interview with a white ex-cop who blamed his murder conviction on racist black jurors.

He resigned in late 1995, reportedly after his show was yanked off the air because he was making fun of a longtime, folksy commentator at his own station.

Roberts landed in Dallas at KRLD, where a station executive was quoted as saying he had "searched the nation for an outstanding contemporary performer and Rick fit the bill with flying colors."

About a year later, in April 1997, the colors had faded. By then, he'd drawn criticism in the press for calling a gay man 'a nance boy' on the air. One newspaper reported the station and Roberts were unable to agree on a contract extension; another said Roberts was fired for poor ratings.

Within months, he was in San Diego. He brought his "Court of Public Opinion" show to KOGO. "Rick is going to stir things up," the station's general manager promised.

There were problems at KOGO. In September 1998, he walked out on his show when he felt station executives were trying to curtail his comments on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. He came back a few days later, but his air time got bounced around and he switched to KFMB in 2000.

Roberts is a divorced single father raising a 16-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy. He said he doesn't talk much about his family on the air because he doesn't want them to be targets for the people who sometimes call his show with death threats.

He has a pilot's license and goes flying in a rented Cessna several days each week. Flying, he said, is his stress-buster. He used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day but quit last year. Sometimes he still takes a puff or two out in the parking lot during news breaks and commercials. And as any frequent listener can tell you, he has an ongoing battle with his waistline.

Talk radio, he said, "brings out the best and the worst in people." The best was when his listeners in Dallas helped raise money to rebuild a black church burned down by arsonists. Or when his listeners in San Diego helped pay the electricity bills of cash-strapped senior citizens during the energy crisis.

He likes to talk about serious subjects on his show – "I want people to think" – but he said he tries not to take himself or what he does too seriously.

"We're not replacing heart valves here," he said. "It's talk radio."

– JOHN WILKENS

32 posted on 04/15/2002 8:50:12 AM PDT by FresnoDA
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