The Telephone Game

Perhaps you played it as a kid: Arrange a bunch of people in a circle. One person whispers a brief story to the person next to him. That person whispers the story to the other person next to him. . .and so on, around the circle. The story whispered back to its originator is usually unrecognizable.

Thanks to irresponsible media and the ease with which data can be passed along via the Internet, we are experiencing the ill effects of the biggest telephone game ever played. And it is killing us.

Why this topic? Why now? It was prompted by an email from a reader:

My father just called me to let me know our new [FCC] Diversity Chief was on the Glenn Beck Show tonight.  He feels the U.S. should model our radio after Venezuela and that the government should tax stations 100% of gross revenues and if they can't pay it, they would have to forfeit your license. He didn't think there should be private ownership of radio stations. I thought you might want to look into that for our next issue.

Tax stations 100% of their gross revenues? Look into it, indeed!

It turns out that Dad was not entirely accurate in his recollection. A segment of Beck’s show was about new FCC Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd; Lloyd did not appear. The discussion was between Beck and Media Research Center Director of Communications Seton Motley.

Beck started the discussion by paraphrasing Lloyd’s position—based not on recent statements while in his current job but passages from his 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America.

While Beck, in setting up the segment, said that Lloyd would have each station pay 100% of its gross—kicking off a lengthy diatribe—Motley later set the record straight(er) by saying, “That’s not exactly right. That’s an estimated total of what the operating costs are, for somebody like Premiere Broadcasting, who syndicates several large talk show hosts. That’s just an extrapolation of the fine we’ve been discussing, which is dollar for dollar for the annual operating costs.” Huh?

I’m not saying we don’t have concerns with the whole idea of a “diversity chief” within an already-misguided Commission. But with all respect to our reader—a good friend of this publication—and his dad, the email in question is a great example of a malady afflicting our land today.

It started with the estimable Mr. Beck, who didn’t have his facts straight. . .exacerbated by Dad, and doubtless many others, who heard the wrong information wrong and innocently passed it along. This is the telephone game writ large and at its most dangerous. (Our reader, in a follow-up email, noted that his dad is 81, so he can be excused. . .but I guarantee you that similar distortions have been spread by others far younger.)

Admittedly I am in extremis, having made some good-sized gaffes in this all-too-public arena. But how else to explain the ability of, say, the RIAA to perpetrate believable but baseless blather in the performance tax battle? Or the groups who would have us believe that the Portable People Meter is a racist tool?

But we who represent the Fifth Estate should be in extremis, too. Just as we take pains to ensure accurate reporting on the air, we must do so in everything else we do and say as well.

Truth is not-so-slowly being replaced by what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”: things that seem true but are not. We have the power to counter truthiness. Let’s use it.

This article first appeared in the Small Market Radio Newsletter, of which your faithful blogger is editor and publisher. He is also its circulation manager, and as such encourages you to subscribe thereto.