Bloomberg Seeks New Outlet After Radio Show Shake-Up

There was the joke about shooting the police commissioner.

There was the defense of illegal immigrants, because who else “takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?”

There was the concern that pushing them out of the country would make the United States a “piranha,” not a pariah, in the eyes of the world. And there was the description of a tree the Parks Department was cloning as being the one that “George Washington supposedly slept under and had an apple fall on his head, or maybe it was Newton, or one of those guys.”

On his weekly call-in radio show with John Gambling on WABC-AM, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg may not have kept up the Wild West tone of his combative predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani — he never berated a caller as “deranged” or told a woman whose son had been shot dead by the police that she should question his upbringing.

Nonetheless, almost every Friday from 10 to 11 a.m. since Feb. 1, 2002, the highly choreographed, fiercely private billionaire provided entertainment of a different sort, nudging back the curtain on his prickly personality, his gaffe-prone sense of humor and even his occasionally devil-may-care eating habits.

“Me, I like a big hamburger and fries dipped in mayonnaise,” he said in 2004, urging New Yorkers to “live a little” despite city efforts to make them adopt healthier habits. “I like some mayo and mustard, and ketchup and pickles and lettuce and tomato on my hamburger.”

But the tradition of the Friday morning talk with the mayor, begun by Mr. Giuliani in 1994, has ended for now. Mr. Gambling was fired amid budget cuts at the station and Mr. Bloomberg has not accepted an offer to appear on the new show in the same time slot, which features Curtis Sliwa as host and has more of a national focus.

On the first installment on Friday, Mr. Sliwa, introduced to the beats of “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, lamented the loss of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Gambling. He joked that he planned to camp outside Mr. Bloomberg’s East 79th Street town house, cook “Shabbos chicken” and “break flatbread” with the mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, an observant Jew, until Mr. Bloomberg agreed to return to the show.

Officials at WABC and its parent company, the Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, did not return telephone calls. But Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, an industry publication, said the change was part of a larger trend of traditional radio stations looking to increase their national appeal to counter the threats of scarce advertising dollars, a souring economy, budget cuts and the rise of the Internet.

“There’s no question that Curtis Sliwa would be a hotter property in national syndication,” Mr. Harrison said. “John Gambling is more of a traditional entity that New Yorkers know institutionally because his father and his grandfather were both on the radio.”

For his part, Mr. Gambling said that he planned to return to the airwaves, and would love to be back with Mr. Bloomberg, but that he first needed to finalize his terms with WABC.

“It’s hard to understand when you lose your job when you’re working on all eight cylinders,” he said, adding that he had taken the show from 17th to 6th place in its time slot since 2000. “Not only were the ratings excellent but the sales, the revenues generated, were literally in the top performers on the radio station.”

In the meantime, Mr. Loeser said, Mr. Bloomberg is fielding offers from other outlets, and is looking for a venue “to talk about what we’re trying to do for New Yorkers, make our case directly to them and also get feedback from them.” Those include NY1 television and WABC-AM, as well as other radio stations.

New York mayors have been taking to the airwaves for generations. Fiorello H. La Guardia had a weekly program in the 1940s that he used to scold reporters and bookies while telling stories about his family, doling out shopping and cooking tips and reading Dick Tracy comics. More recently, Edward I. Koch made the radio and television rounds while showing up in movie cameos and in the host spot on “Saturday Night Live.” And David N. Dinkins was a fixture on the talk-radio circuit, making several appearances each week.

But “Live From City Hall” became an institution. Conceived by Mr. Giuliani as a way to talk directly to citizens about their frustrations with city services, it has provided a cozy forum for Mr. Bloomberg to make consumer-friendly news announcements, help people navigate city government (hint: call 311) and drum up support for pet projects.

Occasionally, the mayor has used his appearances on the show, where Mr. Gambling provided a more sympathetic and controlled atmosphere than a news conference, to concede a mistake, like when he abruptly apologized and canceled parking tickets issued during a snowstorm in February 2007.

And there were times that Mr. Bloomberg took on specific problems, Mr. Gambling said, recalling an instance when a man complained that he had received a parking ticket for his pickup truck, which was treated as a commercial truck rather than a passenger vehicle. Mr. Bloomberg said he would look into it, Mr. Gambling said, and the next week announced that the ticket had been canceled.

Listeners were also given glimpses of the mayor’s emotional life, on his love of being rich — “Am I thrilled that I started out working in a parking lot and made a lot of money? Yes.” — and on his dislike of having it pointed out. “It’s annoying to me that people even use it,” he said of the billionaire tag. “Listen, I started out, I made it honestly. It’s supposed to be the great American dream, and then they want to tar you with it.”

And he gave this explanation for being irritated by the interruption of ringing cellphones: “Nobody ever calls me,” he said in early 2003. “I mean, that’s always annoying. I’m the mayor and I never get a call, and there’s somebody always standing in the room with me. They get 10 calls. Who calls them? I can’t figure it out.”