[Peace-discuss] Randall's WILL commentary

[jencart]

Hi Listeners,

Increasingly, PBS' so-called news is pretty much center/right of center....It can't afford to offend its corporate sponsors, w/ so many listeners out of work, and gov't funding drying up.... Yeah, they were walking on eggshells a bit.....But aside from the fact that the announcer can't put a simple sentence together -- good reason for a person in the communications business to feel apologetic -- I take the intro to mean, Most of our listeners think their point of view is expressed on our regular call in talk shows.  Today, we have a listener who does not feel his point of view is adequately represented..... The outro just seemed kinda white bread... 

What does stick in my craw, and which I haven't noticed elsewhere -- e g prior to (quoting Carl) the awful Doris Kearns Goodwin's so-called thoughts on the so-called news -- is the disclaimer that precedes Media Matters: The views expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the views of this station, nor those of PBS as a whole....

Jenifer C.
--------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Linda Evans" <veganlinda at yahoo.com>
To: "Peace Discuss" <peace-discuss at lists.groogroo.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 10:19 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Randall's WILL commentary


: Randall,
:
: I thought your commentary was great, but I did notice
: a difference in what they said prior and after your
: commentary.  They seemed a little apologetic.

Yeah, both the intro and outro were notable.

I recorded the whole thing - here's a transcript of the intro:

-------- begin ----------
In general, we consider our locally-produced call-in talk programs to be our vehicles for listeners to participate
in dialog about important issues of the day. From time to time, though, we hear from someone for whom those programs might not provide an appropriate venue. Randall Cotton recently submitted some of his thoughts about the United States military action in Iraq.
--------- end -----------

I'm not sure why they introduced it this way. Why not just say "here's a guest commentary submitted by Randall Cotton". What's with the cryptic "appropriate venue" wordage? It's so nebulous that it could indeed be interpreted as apologetic - sort of like "well this guy has been kind of a problem for us, but we had to give him some airtime so he could vent his views since our call-in talk programs aren't an 'appropriate venue'. Sorry about this." That's an extreme interpretation, but still valid, I think.

and here's the outro:
-------- begin ----------
WILL AM-580 will consider replies addressed to 300 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana 61801 or e-mailed to willamfm at uiuc.edu
--------- end -----------

Continuing with the extreme interpretation, this sounds a bit like "Please send us rebuttals to this guy's rant".

I wonder what they intend to do with any "replies" they receive? And what kind of replies could they expect to get? It seems to me that this is only likely to elicit some sort of pro-war commentary, it seems to me. Perhaps that's the idea.

I'm mulling over how to proceed.

R


  They
: said something about most listeners find the local
: talk portion of AM580 sufficient to voice their views,
: but implied that the following person didn't find
: their views expressed on AM580.  Also, at the end of
: the commentary they usually say something like 'We
: encourage listeners like you to get involved.  If you
: would like to be a guest commentator on AM580 call
: xxx-xxxx.'  They did not say this after Randall's
: commentary.  What she did say was if you would like to
: comment on this commentary please write to 
:
:
:
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