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"My show is billed as finance, but to get it down to one word, I talk about life," says Williams. "Radio is, at bottom, an entertainment medium, and if you lose sight of that, you're not eating the right hamburgers. But I also regard what I do as a profound responsibility. I tell my listeners to wear seat belts, and one caller phoned in to say that it saved her friend's life. That's heavy-duty stuff."
Sally Jessy Raphael, a 29-year veteran of the business, knows about heavy-duty stuff too. A few years ago a woman committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills while talking to Sally on the air. "Two minutes before the crew got there, she gave out," Raphael recalls. "Things like that blow your mind and wrench me beyond belief." A more typical batch of callers on a recent segment of her Dear Abby-style Talknet program had less cataclysmic troubles: a wife whose husband had lost interest in sex, a woman who wanted suggestions for a house gift for her daughter living in New York City, a man who did not want to ride in the back seat of his father-in-law's truck on a trip to Florida. Raphael's advice is heavily laced with reassuring bromides ("One of the hardest things in the world is to rebuild trust") and sympathetic handwringing.
At 43, Raphael is married to her second husband, and between them they have eight children (one adopted, three foster). She readily admits that she has no psychological training for her over-the-air counseling, just an abundance of life experience and an upbeat message. "I'm a cheerleader of sorts, always positive," says Raphael, who also is host of a nationally syndicated talk show on commercial TV, "telling people they can make it, that the world's problems can be solved. But I never took Detachment 101, and I tend to get too emotionally involved. I care too much."
Compared with Raphael and her middle-American effusiveness, British-born Michael Jackson is positively highbrow. Yet Jackson, who runs a weekday talk show on ABC Talkradio, can mix it up with the best of them. In 1980 Senator Ted Kennedy began a telephone interview by announcing to Jackson, "On behalf of my family and the people of America, we feel we owe a great debt to you and your brothers for your great contribution to American music." Jackson (no relation, of course, to the rock star) replied, without missing a beat: "Sir, on behalf of my brothers and myself, I thank you. You are the Senator that had the charisma bypass, aren't you?"
A slight, self-effacing native of London, Jackson, 51, launched his radio career in South Africa at age 16, and later became a popular all-night radio host in San Francisco. Now based in Los Angeles, Jackson welcomes an eclectic array of newsmakers, authors and celebrities to his lively gabfest, peppering them with polite but sometimes prickly questions. Yet Jackson is unfailingly gracious toward his call-in listeners. "My job is to provide hospitality," he says. "You have to build a rapport, a bridge. People are not morons. If they have taken the trouble to call and to battle to get through, they have something to say and it is my job to help them say it."