I like when non-broadcast people try to understand the broadcasting industry and present grandiose assumptions as fact. I like it even better when it’s done within the Tupperware-fresh confines of the progressive echo chamber as a way to smear conservatives.
Lefty Tablet magazine ran an article alleging that one of the biggest radio syndicates out there, Premiere Radio, also offers a fake call service to clients, wherein professional voice actors are paid to call into talk shows.
“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.”
[…]
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.”
This is where progressives’ inability to use logic and reason together in order to come to a rational deduction eludes them. Instead of thinking how many talkers may use a service like that to pull off pranks and skits, which most people, unless you have the mental aptitude of a moose, instantly recognize as a facetious endeavor, Tablet leaps across the Grand Canyon of logical gaps and runs with the opposite narrative:
It is time to question this notion as well. The next caller you hear, the next personal story that makes you sniffle or shout with rage, may be the doing of someone at some faceless casting agency, hiring actors and writing scripts designed to titillate. The point is, without something like the hoshen, an object capable of channeling the celestial spirit and telling truth from lie, we’ll never know.
This sentence was just dropped in as fact:
But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.
Actually, no. A great show depends upon the strength of its driver, the host’s personality, its timely content, and a great producer. Callers are fun, can enliven a show, and they drive certain formats, but I disagree that calls alone serve as a marker of a talk radio show’s popularity. There is a difference between a call-in show and a call-driven show.
As a talk radio host, I’ve had my share of fake callers.
One week in particular stands out: it was the week prior to the health control vote where I had five different callers call the show and every single one of them had the exact same talking points. Exact. In fact, I even Googled some of their remarks on break and surprise, surprise, they were part of an OFA talk radio call campaign. Talking points were listed instructing progressives how to engage in conversation. They were literally reading them into the phone receiver.
I’ve had fake callers, progressives, call into my show trying to trap me into saying things (they’re horrible actors and end up embarrassing themselves); I’ve had fake callers pretend to be conservatives and then launch into diatribes — one even insulted my regular Wednesday guest, Andre Harper, by calling him an “Uncle Tom.”
But I’ve never had a fake caller pretend to be conservative and speak as one on the issues, nor would I. Our phone lines are packed every day by themselves.
I don’t begrudge free enterprise. I have colleagues in the industry who pull obvious pranks and skits from time to time, and within the bounds of comedy I can see room for a company like this, although it seems completely contrived and cheesy. But this is nothing new. Progressives have been calling into shows on behalf of MoveOn, Credo, and OFA for a long time. The funny thing is that it would be conservative talk radio that’s smart enough to get paid for it.
(The Dana Show airs M-F 2-4 p.m. central, in St. Louis and Indianapolis. You can stream it live here.)
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