We have a Mole!

Soylent Green infiltrates the very first taping of her TV show.

Topic was porn on the library and the internet.

It was boring. Mind-numbingly boring. Incredibly mind-numbingly boring. She interviewed guests and showed a of couple video clips. No call-ins. One question from the audience (not sure if it was a plant).

More details later.

-- Soylent Green

Is that it?? C'mon, man, we're dying here!

There was little audience participation. She didn't talk to audience members, and only one one person raised his hand and asked a question. Everyone she talked to was in the front row, and with the one exception, everything was set up in advance. Not what I would consider an interactive program.

As to the format, I guess that's about what I saw. She defines a problem, and shows how it affects ordinary people. She has man-on-the-street video bites with some opinions about it. She did have 4 guests as "experts" : a congressman and an ex-librarian who agreed with her, and a lawyer and another guy who disagreed. I wouldn't call it a debate exactly. She was sympathetic to the people who agreed, she quickly cut off the guys who disagreed. For example, when one guest started to explain that internet filters don't always work, she interrupted him with a remark that neither do condoms, and it's the same people who hand those out that are against filtering. Her radio show has given her a lot of practice with comebacks like these. And she wondered why nobody from the ALA would appear on her show!

Anne wrote:

Also, how did she refer to her poll question? Did she make it clear that there was only one way to answer the question and there was no room to add any negative or positive feedback along with your reply to the poll?

It was: here's the question from my website, 17% said no, 83% said yes. No pesky details about sample size, who participated, margin of error, or even that one person could vote until their mouse button wore out.

WRL wrote:

OK, so what is that "warrior of the day" about?

Some woman who was told that by a librarian that the library couldn't tell her what materials her daughter had checked out. The woman was there with her two teenage daughters. A real group of suckups, but what do you expect from a warrior? The woman wrote to two senators, I forget what else. This was towards the end of the show and I was really bored. One of the opposition guys spoke up and tried to explain there might be a good reason for privacy, like if a kid was afraid of being abused. The toxic harpy cut him off claiming that would almost never happen, and went into a speech on how the libraries are protecting the kids from the parents. Blah, blah, blah. It really didn't have the emotional impact of one of her radio rants. It was somewhat more subdued, and also lessened by her being face-to-face with an intelligent person instead of an anonymous, pathetic listener.

After all the protests, discussions and everything, I really found the show to be anti-climatic and disappointing. I really expected to have a much, much stronger reaction.

-- Soylent Green

*And* she exposed minors to porn, too.

After the toxic harpy left the studio, the audience was asked to stick around and look at some porn web pages. They wanted to tape the audience reaction. All the underage guests where asked to leave. However, the one audience member who asked a question was a 17 yr old kid. He was there with a 17 yr old buddy. (The audience was supposed to be over 18, I'm not sure why they were there). Anyway, they didn't leave. When they showed us the first site, the 17 yr olds suddenly realized that everyone knew they were underage. One of them buried his face in his hands because a lot of people were looking at them. And she complains about libraries?

About the porn: there really wasn't much reaction. First site was www.whitehouse.com . I've seen worse. Second site, I couldn't make out enough detail to see what it was about. They were supposed to show another site, but decided it wasn't worth it. Maybe everybody was just too bored to care by that time. If they wanted to get a good reaction they should have showed a site with you-know-who's crotch shot.

-- Soylent Green