I spotted this over the weekend and was reluctant to write about it because it wasn’t well sourced and the people talking about it were drawing probably incorrect inferences. (Tom Taylor covered it in his newsletter this morning)
The story is that Premiere on Call hires people to call into radio shows, pretending to be real callers – but they’re working from a script or a scenario. Reportedly, the’re paid $40 an hour. It’s all very hush hush and non-disclosured to death. You may remember a commotion about 6 months ago when Tribune in Chicago got busted for telling its non-radio employees to call into Mike McConnell’s local show which was suffering from a lack of intelligent callers.
So the Huffington post types are all atwitter that this discovery has something to do with Glenn Beck, Rush or Hannity. That’s not likely – those shows don’t have problems getting calls. Premiere, to the extent they want to talk about it, are describing it as a service used by local stations, mostly music stations.
But the really interesting thing it surfaced is suspicions that Hannity is not doing his third hour live on some days… the show gets phone numbers of “good” callers and calls them before 3PM and tapes the final hour of the show first.
I don’t listen enough to know, and I’m pretty sure it is an occasional thing – like when he is leaving for a weekend tour date. His show on Fox airs at 9PM, and at least some of the time, Hannity is doing the radio show from a studio in his house on Longuyland.
I know for a fact that Rusty Humphries often runs taped hours on Fridays… and we all know by now that Savage almost never does his third hour live.
So keep an ear out and see if this thing has any legs. I have to say I’m not a fan of hosts doing their shows from a home studio, but they almost all do now. Having contact with real people matters, especially someone who doesn’t agree with you from time to time to test your ideas.
