{"id":3260,"date":"2008-09-08T06:38:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-08T11:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3260"},"modified":"2008-09-08T06:38:03","modified_gmt":"2008-09-08T11:38:03","slug":"we-got-a-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3260","title":{"rendered":"We Got A Call"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from &#8220;Doug&#8221;, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities.<\/p>\n<p>And yow &#8211; what a phone call.\u00a0 Ed <a href=\"http:\/\/hotair.com\/archives\/2008\/09\/06\/ms-nbc-convention-driver-crowd-questions-rigged\/\">has the audio from the phone call<\/a> &#8211; it&#8217;s about six minutes.\u00a0 Give it a listen.<\/p>\n<p>Ed summarizes:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li><em>According to Doug, MS-NBC apparently took no chances on questions from the crowd.\u00a0 Rather than get caught with a question that might make Republicans look good, their producer pre-screened questioners, and Chris Matthews pretended it was random.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Republicans were good tippers.\u00a0 MS-NBC stiffed the drivers.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Media people talked in the cars about how effective the Republican convention turned out to be, while publicly saying something else entirely<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politicalbyline.com\/2008\/09\/06\/sorry-guys-i-dont-buy-it\/\">reading this bit here<\/a> &#8211; which criticizes Ed&#8217;s piece (and, by extension I suppose, mine) on the subject &#8211; there are a few legitimate questions about this segment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;much as I realize that MSNBC is now a left leaning network, mostly at night, this sort of \u201cbottom of the barrel\u201d type of scraping to find dirt on networks that don\u2019t agree with your political ideologies is, quite frankly, childish and immature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There was no &#8220;scraping&#8221;; Doug called us, unsolicited.\u00a0 And<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You think Fox News doesn\u2019t pre-screen people on their network? <em>Please<\/em>. Don\u2019t make me laugh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I won&#8217;t make you laugh, but I might make you learn something, with any luck.<\/p>\n<p><em>Of course <\/em>Fox (and everyone else) screens people.\u00a0 The objection is to screening to find people that <em>precisely <\/em>fit the narrative that&#8217;s already been written.<br \/>\nAnd finally:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Okay, first of all, were any precautions taken to ensure that this guy was not some sort of crank caller? I <em>highly<\/em> doubt this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We &#8211; our producer Matt, in this case &#8211; did the usual phone screen.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not <em>impossible<\/em> to think there was a crank.<\/p>\n<p>So we&#8217;ll do what bloggers do; cast the question open to the legions of experts out there.<\/p>\n<p>Were you a volunteer at the convention?\u00a0 Were you in the audience on MSNBC?\u00a0 What did you see?<\/p>\n<p>My gut says the guy was on the level.\u00a0 But what the heck; let&#8217;s shoot for confirmation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from &#8220;Doug&#8221;, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities. And yow &#8211; what a phone call.\u00a0 Ed has the audio from the phone call &#8211; it&#8217;s about six minutes.\u00a0 Give it a listen. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-convention-08","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3260","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=3260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}