Both the Republicunts and Democraps LOVE to out each other on tactics they use themselves. Dig these two articles noting that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck et al use paid callers on their shows, and Obama uses shills to call into those very shows with Obama talking points. That pretty much covers the call-in portion of their shows--none of it is real. None of it. Quit listening to them, quit buying into their definition of what this country is all about. Wake up!
Radio Daze
Tabletmag
(Liel Leibovitz) Last year, a young man called in to a radio station with a problem. He’d recently attended a bachelor party, he said, and a friend of the groom-to-be, clueless of the unwritten etiquette of maledom, brought his girlfriend along, derailing what was supposed to be a weekend of gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The caller told his story with passion and verve, and then asked the station’s listeners for their advice on how to treat his clueless pal.
Or at least he would have, had this been a real conversation. The young man—who asked to remain nameless in order to protect his chances for future employment—was an actor, and the staged call an audition. A short while later, he received the following email: “Thank you for auditioning for Premiere On Call,” it said. “Your audition was great! We’d like to invite you to join our official roster of ‘ready-to-work’ actors.” The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day.
But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.
“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”
Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.
“Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”
The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.
Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.”
Rachel Nelson, a Premiere Radio Networks spokesperson, defended the Premiere on Call service and said that responsibility for how it is employed falls ultimately to those who use it.
“Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,” Nelson wrote in an email. “Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting—while character and script development, and how the talent’s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.”
Organizing for America building army of talk radio ‘seminar callers’
Remember Organizing for America (OFA)? It used to be “Obama for America,” an offshoot of the Democratic National Committee that assembled a vast volunteer army of Obama supporters. But when the election was over and won, “Obama for America” went through a slight transformation:
The trouble with this strategy is: it won’t work.
Rush Limbaugh coined the word “seminar callers” to describe people like this, because leftists used to train would-be talk radio callers in special seminars. These trained callers learn to begin by saying, “I listen to your show all the time, and normally I agree with you/I’m a lifelong Republican/but…” then recite memorized liberal talking points. (Here’s an IndyMedia how-to.)
It’s just another form of astroturfing, and it stopped working years ago.
All big time talk radio shows have peerless call screeners who usually detect these frauds before they get on the air. If these astroturfers do get through, a smart host can make them look pretty foolish, pretty fast.
Seminar calling is going the way of that other leftist tactic, the boycott. Boycotts don’t work anymore because a) leftists target companies that leftists don’t patronize anyway (like WalMart), b) older leftists have boycott fatigue, and younger ones only pay lip service to them, and c) boycotts can’t harm certain modern day businesses, like cable TV (as I’ve explained before.)
And I think OFA knows this. (If they don’t, then the good news is, the Democrats are dumber than we thought.)
This campaign, and their other internet efforts, are just a way to harvest email addresses, so they can tap the suckers for donations later on.
Nothing says “progressive” like that patented hybrid of idealism and cynicism.
Disdain drips from every word in the second article, as if the writer is blissfully unaware her heroes hire callers to call their shows. It goes both ways. The sooner people realize this the better. Your heroes are not heroes, they are actors who follow a script. Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh would be liberal talkshow hosts if there were a market for them. Liberals don't listen to talk radio but conservatives do, so that's the role they play. Dennis Miller got into the con, too. Saw where the money was, and dipped himself in red state hothead red. Money, money, money. Not principles--MONEY.
This information, when considered with the fact Glenn Beck used Vick's in his eyes for his crying game scenes on his former TV show, just exposes the whole political/talkshow industry as the fake propaganda it is. If you watch or listen to these shows, no matter what your affiliation is, you never get anything real or truthful, and if you base your political views on these talkshows and the views of their hosts, then your views aren't real either. You're just a cardboard cut-out and by being so oriented, you're the result of their lying game being successful. How does that make you feel?
Radio Daze
Tabletmag
(Liel Leibovitz) Last year, a young man called in to a radio station with a problem. He’d recently attended a bachelor party, he said, and a friend of the groom-to-be, clueless of the unwritten etiquette of maledom, brought his girlfriend along, derailing what was supposed to be a weekend of gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The caller told his story with passion and verve, and then asked the station’s listeners for their advice on how to treat his clueless pal.
Or at least he would have, had this been a real conversation. The young man—who asked to remain nameless in order to protect his chances for future employment—was an actor, and the staged call an audition. A short while later, he received the following email: “Thank you for auditioning for Premiere On Call,” it said. “Your audition was great! We’d like to invite you to join our official roster of ‘ready-to-work’ actors.” The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day.
But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.
“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”
Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.
“Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”
The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.
Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.”
Rachel Nelson, a Premiere Radio Networks spokesperson, defended the Premiere on Call service and said that responsibility for how it is employed falls ultimately to those who use it.
“Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,” Nelson wrote in an email. “Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting—while character and script development, and how the talent’s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.”
++++++
Organizing for America building army of talk radio ‘seminar callers’
Remember Organizing for America (OFA)? It used to be “Obama for America,” an offshoot of the Democratic National Committee that assembled a vast volunteer army of Obama supporters. But when the election was over and won, “Obama for America” went through a slight transformation:
Another factor that motivated the Obama administration to create OFA was the fact that after the new President had taken his oath of office, his White House was, by law, barred from using (for subsequent political purposes) the 13-million-name e-mail list of supporters it had compiled during the 2008 presidential race. Thus the administration established OFA within the structure of the Democratic Party, which was not bound by such restrictions; OFA is free to use the aforementioned list as it pleases. (…)
OFA’s latest web-based project involves inundating talk radio shows with callers pushing Obamacare. Here’s part of the relevant page on the OFA site:
As one of its strategies for influencing public opinion, OFA seeks to exploit the power of the Internet as a networking and communication medium. Whereas previous U.S. presidents communicated with the American public chiefly by recording a weekly speech and then releasing it for radio stations to air on Saturday mornings, President Obama regularly disseminates his messages via popular websites…
Each day, millions of Americans turn to talk radio as a trusted source of news and opinions on the big issues of the day.
Getting thousands of OFA supporters to call in to these shows in support of health reform and President Obama’s agenda will have a dramatic impact — and will help shape public opinion.
But we need you to make it happen…OFA goes on to ask folks to sign up, get assigned a station in their area, and starting phoning in during talk shows, to push Obamacare talking points.
The trouble with this strategy is: it won’t work.
Rush Limbaugh coined the word “seminar callers” to describe people like this, because leftists used to train would-be talk radio callers in special seminars. These trained callers learn to begin by saying, “I listen to your show all the time, and normally I agree with you/I’m a lifelong Republican/but…” then recite memorized liberal talking points. (Here’s an IndyMedia how-to.)
It’s just another form of astroturfing, and it stopped working years ago.
All big time talk radio shows have peerless call screeners who usually detect these frauds before they get on the air. If these astroturfers do get through, a smart host can make them look pretty foolish, pretty fast.
Seminar calling is going the way of that other leftist tactic, the boycott. Boycotts don’t work anymore because a) leftists target companies that leftists don’t patronize anyway (like WalMart), b) older leftists have boycott fatigue, and younger ones only pay lip service to them, and c) boycotts can’t harm certain modern day businesses, like cable TV (as I’ve explained before.)
And I think OFA knows this. (If they don’t, then the good news is, the Democrats are dumber than we thought.)
This campaign, and their other internet efforts, are just a way to harvest email addresses, so they can tap the suckers for donations later on.
Nothing says “progressive” like that patented hybrid of idealism and cynicism.
+++
Disdain drips from every word in the second article, as if the writer is blissfully unaware her heroes hire callers to call their shows. It goes both ways. The sooner people realize this the better. Your heroes are not heroes, they are actors who follow a script. Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh would be liberal talkshow hosts if there were a market for them. Liberals don't listen to talk radio but conservatives do, so that's the role they play. Dennis Miller got into the con, too. Saw where the money was, and dipped himself in red state hothead red. Money, money, money. Not principles--MONEY.
This information, when considered with the fact Glenn Beck used Vick's in his eyes for his crying game scenes on his former TV show, just exposes the whole political/talkshow industry as the fake propaganda it is. If you watch or listen to these shows, no matter what your affiliation is, you never get anything real or truthful, and if you base your political views on these talkshows and the views of their hosts, then your views aren't real either. You're just a cardboard cut-out and by being so oriented, you're the result of their lying game being successful. How does that make you feel?
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