NBC News hosed me. Talk about the Fleecing of America, and it was NBC doing the shearing.
Boston Herald
May 30 Howie Carr
For purposes of education and discussion only
Yeah, I should have known better. But hell, it wasn't CNN - the Clinton News Network. And Bryant Gumbel has crossed the street. But the sad reality is that, Juannita Broaddrick notwithstanding, NBC stands for Nothing But Clinton.
And when it was all over, Tom Brokaw didn't even say, ''You'd better put some ice on that.''
Here's what happened. At the Peacock's behest Tuesday, I devoted the first hour of my radio show to that most tired of topics, gun control.
They were looking, they said, for a sound bite of someone saying he'd changed his or her (preferably female) mind on gun control since Littleton.
So I took 32 calls, at least 28 of which were anti-gun control. Most of the callers said, yeah, they'd changed their minds, specifically, in that they'd gotten a lot more PO'd about being scapegoated by fools like Spike Lee, not to mention the usual Clinton apologists who, when they're not denouncing the NRA as a threat to Western civilization, are cheering the use of cluster bombs against civilians in the Balkans and bellowing ''McCarthyism'' at anyone who mentions the illegal Chinese cash that was being funneled into Clinton's coffers.
To recap - 28 of my 32 callers did not say the Politically Correct thing NBC was looking for, but four did.
Can you guess which quote Lisa Myers - or her producer - used in her package that evening on NBC Nightly News?
Now I understand that when you allow a camera crew into your life, you run certain risks. And yes, when I was in local TV news, I sent people out and I told them what sound bites I needed. But if the sentiment is running 7-1 against the conventional wisdom, don't you need to at least mention that fact in your story?
In retrospect, I should have suspected a setup when NBC called about gun control on the day the Cox Report came out.
My first instinct was to tell them to find some other chump. I've been down this road before. They don't get what they want, so you get left on the cutting-room floor. One time, after Oklahoma City, they came in and backlit the studio so I looked as demented as Eric Bogosian in ''Talk Radio.'' But after 15 minutes in which nobody quoted from ''Mein Kampf,'' they got discouraged and left.
So, I figured, I can handle NBC.
Boy, was I naive.
The first tip-off came when the crew stayed the whole hour. Obviously, they'd left a hole in Myers' piece for a five-second sound bite that would conform to the spin they'd already decided on, facts be damned.
After a ''hard'' news piece it was time for Lisa Myers' sidebar. Deep thinkers Rosie O'Donnell and Sharon Stone flickered across the screen. Then a GOP pollster, citing no polls, mentioned the changes in ''suburban America.''
Myers: ''Suburban women in particular have changed their minds. One who owns guns called a Boston radio show.''
How does Lisa Myers know this woman is from the suburbs? I never asked the caller, and she never told me.
''I think,'' said the caller, ''this is entirely reasonable and neither my husband nor I are impacted in any bad way from this.''
Oh well, it's over now. And I did learn a lesson. Nowadays NBC is no different from those tabloid TV shows.
I still have to do business with these guys at some level. Although, come to think of it, I haven't been on MSNBC in two months. Not since the night I reminded Brian Williams of the old Abraham Lincoln brigades of pinko American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Maybe, I said, if all of the Beautiful People in Hollywood, Wall Street and Martha's Vineyard believe so fervently in bombing Serbian hospitals and refugee convoys, they ought to enlist to fight in Kosovo.
They could call themselves the Bill Clinton Brigade.
Brian Williams laughed nervously, I vanished, and it's been sayo-bleeping-nara ever since.
Payback is a bitch. But I already knew that.
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