MEDIA DePetro heads to the Hub BY IAN DONNIS

It didn’t come as a complete surprise to me to learn that John DePetro, who won his share of friends and critics during five years as a talk-show host at WHJJ (920 AM), was pulling up stakes for a new job at WRKO (680 AM) in Boston. The self-styled Independent Man never seemed to lack for ambition, and when I wrote a longer piece about talk-radio last summer, he told me how RKO had asked him to do a Saturday evening program.

"John the Jingoist" to some because of his right-leaning views (DePetro offered unqualified backing for President George W. Bush’s statement that people are either for or against the United States), the Rhode Island native was fully capable of breaking news and doing his best work while casting a sharp eye on local politics with intelligence and humor. (Disclosure: I’m a weekly guest on the WPRO AM show of Dan Yorke, and there has been little love lost between DePetro and Yorke.)

DePetro, not surprisingly, seems pumped about the opportunity to move to a larger market in a city with more media and a new cast of political intrigues. "For me, it took an aggressive approach and tone," he says, citing ratings as the ultimate arbiter of success in his chosen medium. Expressing satisfaction with 15 or so appearances on Imus, DePetro says, "That’s not something that happens with a local host." Certainly, it’s an impressive rise for a Rhode Island College graduate who returned to the state, at a considerable loss in salary, after selling radio advertising in New York City.

Yet if DePetro carved a distinct identity for himself on WHJJ, some saw it as something of a Faustian bargain. Last week, ProJo columnist Bob Kerr wrote, "As DePetro packs up for his move to a bigger radio market in Boston later this summer, he takes with him a sorry broadcasting shtick that has declined into a daily swamp of ridicule and the unquestioning embrace of things that need to be questioned. I don’t think it’s really DePetro so much as it is the business he’s in. Talk-radio hosts often seem in a desperate competition to prove which can be more outrageous -- like schoolyard daredevils willing to jump off the gym roof to impress the girls. Talk radio, with some obvious exceptions, has become an increasingly coarse exercise in grabbing attention rather than making sense and enriching the public conversation. It’s gimmicks. It’s whatever works, whatever rouses those people who still live at home with the folks and have plenty of time on their hands."

Talk radio plays a distinct role in little Rhode Island, where the hosts sometimes advance a story or offer an insight. It can be delicious when someone takes a surprising stand, such as when DePetro recently afforded surprising respect for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Yorke, who also leans conservative, railed against Wal-Mart’s growing hegemony. For the most part, though, it’s hard not to agree with Kerr’s critique about the shortcomings of the medium.