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Who listens to the talk shows? More important, who calls in? Mostly the sad, the sick and the lonely. Dr. Norton Kristy, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, calls some shows a kind of interpersonal glue, something people these days need, with the spaces between people being so much greater and with the fragmentation of the family." The Bill Ballance sex show, says Kristy, has "tapped a rather powerful personal and social desire on the part of young women to express all their frustrations. Ballance is providing the social acceptance and respectability for female sensuality and sexuality that Playboy magazine did for men 15 years ago."
Adds Dr. Salvatore Maddi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago: "Loneliness is an endemic problem of our time, and there are many people who literally have no friends. A disk jockey, particularly one who seems interested in his listeners, fulfills a need—he's a substitute friend."
* If they measure satisfaction in more conventional terms, top talk jockeys are paid up to $200,000 a year on big stations.