A High Profile for a Homespun Cable Talk Show Host

Leslie Dutton is no stranger to combative campaigns.

She has pushed for crackdowns on homeless people who commit crimes in Santa Monica, railed against billboards advertising condoms and helped to win a fight forcing illegal immigrants to pay out-of-state tuition rates at California colleges.

But being the moderator of a homespun talk show, not a controversial activist, is the legacy the Santa Monica resident hopes to leave.

“Probably the most important motivating factor for what I’ve been doing is the search for truth,” said Dutton, 58, who 7 1/2 years ago parlayed her passion for getting involved into a widely aired public access cable show called “Full Disclosure.”

Her half-hour program filmed at Century Cable is simple, talk show fare:

She invites one or more guests to join her at a table and questions them in a soft-spoken manner, with a tone that remains cordial and polite, even when she disagrees with an answer.

“She is so disarming, but she puts you right on the spot,” said LAPD Deputy Chief David Gascon, a guest on “Full Disclosure” several times.

Dutton says her goal is to get important issues such as public safety and government and media ethics before the public.

Her on-air style and off-camera persistence have landed her more notable guests than one might expect on a public access show, among them former U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese, Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh and former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates.

“People wanted to be on it,” she said of the program, shown weekly on dozens of Southland cable and college channels. “It empowered them.”

The show has won several accolades in recent years, including Silver and Gold Angel Awards from Los Angeles-based Excellence in Media.

Recently the host teamed up with independent filmmaker Suzanne Bauman to develop a documentary featuring Dutton’s interviews with attorney generals and special prosecutors in the past quarter-century about their involvement in presidential prosecutions.

Bauman and Dutton said in an interview Friday that they are pitching the program--which will include a UCLA-sponsored round-table discussion in February featuring those guests--to PBS.

“This is like ‘Mrs. Dutton Goes to Washington,’ ” said Bauman, alluding to the classic Frank Capra film in which an average citizen brings down a corrupt political machine in his state.

But Dutton’s success at coaxing national newsmakers onto her show has not kept her from getting into hot water with one of the cable companies featuring it.

MediaOne has suspended broadcast of “Full Disclosure” on its Los Angeles channel through February because Dutton mentioned on air that the organization she founded, the American Assn. of Women, accepts donations. She also sent out mailings offering videotaped copies of her show for $20.

Those actions violated a ban on using public access channels for commercial purposes, said cable and regulatory officials.

It’s left up to individual cable companies to interpret that ban, said Robert Jystad, telecommunications regulatory officer at the Information Technology Agency in Los Angeles.

Dutton said she requests contributions only to cover costs. She added that she is trying to resolve the dispute, although most of her time these days is spent developing the national politics piece.

Her job with a meat company selling bologna before she married 31 years ago was a useful precursor to her own political activism, Dutton jokes. After organizing a successful voter registration drive in Santa Monica in the early 1970s, she helped then-Gov. Ronald Reagan push Proposition 1 limiting taxes, Dutton said.

Although she remains a registered Republican, Dutton said she grew disillusioned working for the party in the early 1980s. She returned to grass-roots organizing in Santa Monica, and in 1984 launched her group to encourage more women to become politically involved, she said. The causes the association embraced were often conservative, but Dutton does not identify herself that way, saying she “would hate to be put in a box.”

Getting her group’s message out proved difficult, Dutton recalled. She bristled over headlines and labels, including “right wing.” She objected to stories lumping criminals, vagrants and the mentally ill living on the streets into a single category: the homeless.

It “really made it evident that print and electronic media were not accurately portraying issues to be discussed,” Dutton said. So in March 1992 she took advantage of public access television. Her first program, questioning whether Santa Monica was a safe city, aired on a single station.

Response from viewers and guests convinced her to continue the show, said Dutton, who has hosted more than 260 half-hour programs. “We all share common problems,” she said.

Dutton said she prepares her shows by talking with viewers, scouring newspaper clippings and searching the Internet. She sometimes plays excerpts from past interviews to elicit comment from guests.

Walsh, for example, responded to criticism of his Iran-Contra prosecution from Reagan’s former attorney general by saying, “I think Meese should be glad we never indicted him,” a retort that Walsh said this week was made tongue in cheek.

He added that he enjoyed doing the show. “I thought she was very serious, very well organized,” Walsh said. “It’s different than dealing with someone trying to meet a deadline.”

The LAPD’s Gascon said: “ ‘Full Disclosure’ is an apt title. We were able to air all views.”

Not necessarily, say other guests.

“It’s a fairly right wing program, but she’s a pretty gracious person,” said Michael Yamamoto, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.

A few complain that the show is anything but the “news behind the news” forum that Dutton claims.

“She was totally hostile,” said Albert Menaster, an L.A. County public defender who appeared in 1994 with Bill Jones, then a Republican assemblyman from Fresno and now California secretary of state. “The problem was, she was not asking him tough questions. She was just attacking me.”

Dutton was surprised by such criticism.

“I don’t think he should take it personally that such pointed questions were asked,” she said. “He added an awful lot to that program.”

She said she does not try to express her views when moderating, though her early shows “probably were a lot more opinionated.”

If her queries are not as sophisticated as those on major shows, that’s fine with her.

“I try to make them questions people at home would want to ask,” she said. How does she know? “Because it’s what I’d like to know.”