Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:47am

Seminar Callers

Seminar caller:

A seminar caller is a caller engaged in astroturfing; said caller usually relies on deceiving call screeners to get through to Limbaugh and other hosts.

Rush used to say during the Clinton years that there was an organized movement to have what he called seminar callers flood talk radio.  How right he was:

The Democratic party developed an elaborate, multi-year operation in the 1990s that deployed thousands of activists to covertly mold public opinion using talk radio, according to documents from the Clinton Presidential Library.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), with the blessing of the Clinton White House, launched the Talk Radio Initiative (TRI) ahead of the 1996 campaign. The program trained thousands of operatives to call in to radio shows, conduct surveillance of their contents, and secretly disseminate Democratic talking points while posing as ordinary listeners.

“Volunteers must be able to keep the project confidential so as not to create the image of a ‘Democratic conspiracy’ to infiltrate Detroit area talk radio shows,” a 1995 TRI guide prepared by Michigan Democrats said. “Democratic performance in the 1996 elections will no doubt be affected by the success or failure of this initiative.”

Radio show hosts long suspected that someone was training so-called “seminar callers” to inundate their shows with sympathetic callers. Lars Larson, a host in the Pacific Northwest since the mid-1990s, recalled being on the receiving end of many such calls, but was not aware that many may have been trained by the DNC.

“You would get calls, an hour apart, from different people with different voices and different names, but they would talk the same lines. So close that you knew that this was not a coincidence,” Larson said. “It was the same language on the same subject and the same arguments.”

Go here to read the rest.  It isn’t paranoia if someone really is out to get you.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Foxfier
Thursday, September 12, AD 2019 12:02pm

I know seeing that in news papers is what made me realize that a lot of news stories were barely altered AP or Reuters feed stories.
Same thing, the arguments and even phrases were identical.

Art Deco
Thursday, September 12, AD 2019 12:27pm

Some years ago there was a discussion at Crisis about the flood of novel or infrequent participants who would appear when certain subjects were raised (“as if they were all working for some sorosphere outfit”). The idea seemed a bit outre at the time. I can see targeting Limbaugh, who has an enormous audience, but small comment sections seems bizarre. But there they were.

You recall that the other side of this campaign was stoking the senescent Ernest Hollings and the hopeless Louise Slaughter to campaign for a return of the Fairness Doctrine, in order to get Limbaugh and others knocked off the air.

David WS
David WS
Thursday, September 12, AD 2019 4:47pm

The NY Times does this on a daily basis, and local newspapers follow….
Twitter mobs do it…
And then there’s GOOGLE>

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, September 12, AD 2019 7:42pm

Gaslighting and Astroturf.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, September 13, AD 2019 2:08am

Something so obvious and stupid has to be Democrat.

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top