KRLA and the Beat history
KRLA personalities
KRLA specialties
The Credibility Gap
Lew Irwin, originally a freelance contributor to KRLA's news programming, let loose his creativity with his creation of the Credibility Gap, a news/commentary group that included KRLA newsmen Richard Beebe, Thom Beck, John Gilliland, David L. Lander, Harry Shearer. It also included Len Chandler (below right), KRLA's "staff poet-singer," as the August 9, 1968 issue of Time Magazine referred to him. Time noted that Chandler "regularly performs his own tendentious commentary to the most dramatic news of the hour."
This was in response to a desire on the part of station manager John Barrett and news director Cecil Tuck to dispense with the five-minute hourly news update, which was more or less a standard format for AM radio news, and employ instead a 15-minute news and commentary program, something that could embrace Irwin's talent for producing timely documentary material.
This involved a balancing act. Irwin, Barrett, and Tuck had to figure out a way to integrate existing KRLA newsmen into the program without alienating the other existing news reporters. Irwin explains this in an article harvested from Don Barrett's (no relation to John Barrett) "LARadio" website from 2007. Read it in Irwin's own words.
The group expanded the news to ten and fifteen minutes and provided a freewheeling, hard-hitting satirical focus on the big stories of the day. "As far as Irwin is concerned" noted the Los Angeles Times in 1978, "'management was the key to the Credibility Gap. Without John Barrett we could never have done the show'."
Courtesy of Wayne Shotten, director of the forthcoming documentary Radio Free L.A., you can view a recent interview with Lew Irwin himself and John Barrett to find out more about this remarkable time at KRLA, which Shotten refers to as "the powerhouse of rock and revolution". It's an apt description of a remarkable interlude in Los Angeles radio history, all courtesy of KRLA and the creative minds who managed it.