C-SPAN's Washington Journal Caller Problem

Myron Kaplan/Eric Rozenman
CAMERA Media Analysis
03 February '10

C-SPAN hosts are typically overly respectful and too patient as a handful of frequent callers spew invective and falsehoods against Jews and Israel. No other ethnic or religious group or nation is repeatedly vilified on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal 3-hour daily broadcasts. This vilification is enabled if not positively encouraged by C-SPAN‘s receptivity especially the feckless performance of the hosts. Many C-SPAN viewers, perhaps not knowing the facts and not hearing them from network hosts or, often, from guests, are at risk of being influenced by those callers seemingly driven by an obsessive pathological desire to falsely blame major world problems on the Jews and Israel.

This group of egregious frequent callers features a particular pair, a man and woman, plus their sound-alikes, working basically from the same script. For example, on two consecutive days in January, the Washington Journal host for both days, Paul Orgel, listened politely, first on January 1 at 9:51 AM to "Janet from Birmingham, Alabama" and then on January 2 at 7:50 AM to "Carol from Scotsville, Arizona." Janet’s call took place during a segment whose topic was "Social Networking & Political Participation" (no guest was on hand) while the topic for Carol’s call was "Rise of Al-Qaeda in Yemen." The latter time, the guest was Christopher Boucek of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The following video clip (3.5 minutes) contains the Janet/Carol calls:

(Click here for full transcript plus video)
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C-SPAN Responds! Well, Not Exactly

C-SPAN Executives Susan Swain and Brian Lamb

AL
CAMERA/Snapshots
15 January '10

As Jeffrey Goldberg has discovered, communicating with C-SPAN executives about their network having become a platform for anti-Semites to spew hatred isn't easy. Unlike virtually every other media outlet, C-SPAN refuses to return phone calls, letters and emails from dissatisfied viewers. This is the case even though C-SPAN considers itself a public service, devoted to promoting a smooth-functioning and interactive democracy.

Goldberg has persisted, though, and on January 14 reported he'd elicited a written statement from Terry Murphy, the network's VP for Programming, who wrote:

The call-in program has been a fixture of the C-SPAN networks for nearly all of our three decades. Our mission statement commits us to providing the audience with "direct access" to our guests on an "open basis". The live, town-hall format of the program can occasionally give rise to distasteful statements by callers making it to air, and the January 4 call is an example. We air approximately 400 calls per week and this kind of language is not typical of the vast majority. Program hosts, whose role is to facilitate the dialogue between callers and guests, are certainly permitted to step in when a caller makes ad hominem attacks or uses obscenity or obviously racist language. Given that this involves quick judgment during a live television production, it's an imperfect process that didn't work as well as it should have that day.

(Read full post)
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