A syndicated host must trust their engineer and / or not screw with them, and under all circumstances you have to assume your microphone is on.
Friday, Laura Ingraham’s headphones stopped working on the air. As listeners to Rush Limbaugh have learned over the years, what the host says is fed back to the host so they can hear themselves and maintain a consistent audio level. The engineer also can pass messages to the host via the IFB – an audio channel heard only by the host.
Upon not hearing herself, Laura went ballistic and started telling her engineer what to do. She was scared of “dead air”. Because radio transmitters can fail for a variety of reasons, many stations have “dead air detectors”. They listen to the over the air signal, and if a certain amount of time goes by with no audio, automated equipment kicks in and plays canned music, and the station engineer is paged to respond to find the problem. Working from the end, the cause might be: transmitter lost power, transmitter failed, studio to transmitter link failed, studio problems, satellite downlink failed, distributor uplink (Westwood One in this case) failed, communication from production studio to distributor failed, or a problem within the production studio – and if the host does the show from a home studio, that link can also fail (over ISDN or the Internet). Most stations have engineers on a contract basis, so the station owner is going to get a bill if this happens. If the cause was at the network, that can make station owners unhappy.
If this had happened to Rush, he would – and has many times – say something like “a note to my engineer – I’m not hearing myself” and go on his way. What Laura did was panic – “what do I do!?” The answer is obvious – you just keep doing your show as if nothing is wrong. If you are really off the air, it doesn’t matter. Laura then starting barking orders at her engineer to put on a tape and call Westwood One. She then declared if the engineer didn’t do something, the show was going to lose every fucking affiliate.
I don’t know for a fact that the recording went out over the network, but even if it was dumped, you never ever swear into a microphone, even if you think it is dead. This is surprising since she is far from a radio novice. I guess the election must been stressing her out.
She is single for a reason. I work with folks who have similar temperament. Smiling one minute and a knife to your throat the next. High pressure and stress does things to people – me, I go see my cardiologist. Others say bad words over the air waves. Sorry, Laura – we now know you are not the budding flower now 🙂
To some degree, she is the symptom of the breakdown in the American society. Apparently unable or unwilling to commit to marrying a man, her family consists of boutique adopted children without a father. Glenn Beck went down a similar path, although apparently did wind up with one child with his wife. We all pretty much know now that Bill Clinton is not a biological father.
Meanwhile the Muslim couples keep turning out large families, confident they have the blessing of Allah to be fruitful and multiply while white Americans feel guilty about killing polar bears by leaving their cell phone chargers plugged in.
This is second hand info, so take it FWIW: I know someone in the radio biz who has hosted various hosts in his city over the years to promote both his group of stations and personalities they offer (guests in the past included Clark Howard, G. Gordon Liddy, Neal Boortz, Laura Ingraham and others). My contact said that all of the shows and hosts were easy to work with except for Ingraham. He said he would never work worth her again because she had been a total prima donna and b****h to deal with. She was dropped from that group of stations when her contract ended.
Radio gossip boards echo the experience of your friend. One amusing anecdote I read was that during a book signing, she took the opportunity to show off her ability to do push-ups. The number of Conservative radio hosts with a normal heterosexual marriage seems fairly small.