And occasionally in the United States.
Commercial television is much less constrained
than public television.
Public television is more liberal.
It's therefore much more ideological and imposes
much more narrower constraints.
They don't allow deviance.
That's pretty constant.
But, it's not in their interest to have people
to talk about things like this.
Sometimes they're pressured and they'll allow
a couple of minutes here and there.
It's kind of interesting the way it works.
Television's mostly out except for commercial
cable television.
But radio is a little freer.
And National Public Radio is considered the
outer limits of the left in the United States.
Very small, but it's considered very dissent.
They are the ones with the sharpest restrictions
by far.
They won't allow a millimeter of deviation
from the party line.
But sometimes they're under pressure to do
it.
Interesting the way it works.
So for example during the first Gulf War...
I'm pretty well known around Boston.
That happens to be the center, the ideological
center for National Public Radio.
It's their flagship station and that sort
of thing.
There's a lot of pressure there to let me
be on now and then.
So during the first Gulf War, they did approach
me and they told me that I would be allowed
to have two and a half minutes.
However, they insisted that I write out what
I was going to say, send it to the central
office so they could ensure that it's okay,
and once they approved it, I had to read it,
and they pre-recorded it to make sure I wouldn't
add a phrase that went off the limits.
The first time, I thought it was sort of ridiculous,
but so did the staff, the staff's mostly laughing,
engineers and so on.
I did read it, and the first reading took
two minutes and thirty-six seconds so they
told me no, I gotta reread it.
So I read it a little faster and got it in
two minutes and thirty seconds and then they
actually did run it.
There are other things like that.
I'll just mention one other case, same, National
Public Radio again, the kind of left medium.
They have a book review thing.
And again, they're under a lot of pressure,
often to have something about books of mine.
Around ten years ago, there was a book of
mine that was based on lectures over CBC and
it was actually a bestseller in Canada for
years but nobody'd ever heard of it in the
United States.
It was never reviewed or anything.
But there was pressure around Boston to get
them to review that book.
So they finally agreed.
And we again had a pre-recorded five-minute
interview with Robert Siegel who's their big
shot intellectual.
And it was actually announced that their main
program called All Things Considered, starts
at 5 o'clock, every educated person's supposed
to listen to it, and at 5 o'clock they announced
that they were going to have a review of this
book.
The publishers of the press called me up and
said great, it's going to be on.
It got to 5:30... it got to 5:25.
At 5:25, the program stopped, and there were
five minutes of music.
At 5:30, when they move into the next segment,
they announced the next segment, then funkel
started coming in from all over the place,
saying what happened to that five-minute review?
People said - I wasn't listening, but people
started calling me, like hey, what happened
to the review?
After about ten minutes, I got a call from
the manager of the whole thing in Washington
who said something very strange.
We're getting a lot of calls saying that your
review didn't appear but we know that it did;
I see it right on my program here.
So I said, I don't know, don't know anything
about it.
About ten minutes later, she called me back,
very [shrin], and she said that she was overruled
for the first time ever by some higher-up
who heard the announcement in the first five
minutes and canceled it.
That caused such a furor.
She was very upset for professional reasons.
Didn't want to be overruled.
And there was a lot of public reaction.
So they finally agreed to redo another five
minutes, you know, pre-recorded, and the second
one actually ran.
Well that's off at the left liberal end of
the spectrum.
When you move to the more conservative commercial
media they're less constrained.
