all-too-common thing in broadcasting<\/a> across partisan lines (the linked clip includes Chris “Tinglylegs” Matthews, Sam Donaldson, and a bipartisan slew of other talking heads – especially, I think, in TV, with its staffs of executives and swarms of people and everybody making decisions but nobody really in charge…<\/p>\n…so I’m usually pretty sanguine about these things.<\/p>\n
Of course there’s a story behind it.<\/p>\n
In the summer of 1982, I was working at a little country station in Carrington,ND (pop 2,000).\u00a0 It was a Sunday afternoon.\u00a0 I was playing “The Lutheran Hour”, a recorded church service, around noon.\u00a0 There was a break in the show where I played a couple of commercials while I cued up the next disk (that’s right – vinyl disk) on the air.<\/p>\n
Commercials back then were on “carts” – plastic tape cartridges that looked and worked like 8-track tapes.\u00a0 The cool thing about ’em, compared to reel-to-reel or cassette, was that they were “fire and forget”; the tape, like an 8-track, was an infinite loop; a silent electronic cue recorded on the tape would stop\u00a0 the tape at the end of the spot (or sound bite or hockey goal or whatever was on it).<\/p>\n
If it worked right.\u00a0 Which it almost always did.<\/p>\n
But on that Sunday afternoon, something – a dirty play head, a bad cue signal, something <\/em>– caused the cue to slip.\u00a0 So about ten seconds after I hit the next spot, the first spot started playing again.\u00a0 Perversely, I couldn’t stop <\/em>the cart deck; one of the features of the cue tone, as I recall, was that it disabled the “Stop” button until there was another”Start”.<\/p>\n“WHAT THE F*** IS GOING ON HERE?”\u00a0 I bellowed.<\/p>\n
And looked, and noticed that I’d left the mike on.<\/p>\n
I sat back in the chair and waited for doom.<\/p>\n
But that Sunday, it never came.\u00a0 Not a single phone call.\u00a0 Best of all, my boss – the station’s owner, who listened to the station from sunup to sundown every day – was taking his only vacation day of the summer that weekend.<\/p>\n
But since then, I’ve tried to never swear around a microphone.<\/p>\n
Just saying, Chris and Bill and the rest of you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re shocked, shocked to see the leftymedia screeching like weasels during procto exams over the now-infamous O’Reilly meltdown tape. Of course, it’s an all-too-common thing in broadcasting across partisan lines (the linked clip includes Chris “Tinglylegs” Matthews, Sam Donaldson, and a bipartisan slew of other talking heads – especially, I think, in TV, with its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}