As an actor living in New York City, even when I'm currently employed as a performer, I have to be looking ahead for the next project. Life is a job search in perpetuity.
This past January I discovered an ongoing audition held by Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of media titan Clear Channel Communications, that syndicates several notable radio programs. They were seeking actors to audition for roles on radio talk shows. The roles, however, were not characters in bits or sketches but rather that of random callers calling in to discuss whatever the topic of the moment was and to offer pertinent stories and opinions. And unlike most performances, the audience in this case wouldn't know they were witnessing a performance.
The job immediately struck me as morally dubious. But curious, I submitted my credentials online and a few weeks later had an audition consisting of a mock radio phone-in. I played a caller asking for advice on how to handle a delicate situation amongst my friends that had arisen during a bachelor party. Later that week I received an email saying that I passed the audition and that Premiere On Call, the name of Premiere Radio's service that supplies actors to client radio stations, would like to add me to their roster of actors. The pay was $40/hour with a minimum of one hour guaranteed. I respectfully declined to take the job.
At no point was I truly surprised that such a service exists. Deception in American media has a long and varied history. I was surprised, however, that such a clear orchestration of deception was so visible yet had seemingly gone unnoticed. Premiere's own website, until recently, openly described the service.
Hoping to explore this further I got in touch with Liel Leibovitz, a journalist and assistant professor at NYU Steinhardt's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. He was surprised to hear of the practice and wanted to write about it in his column for Tablet, an online Jewish magazine. On February 11th, Tablet ran his article.
While it's gratifying that the conversation has begun, a lot of it thus far has missed the point. The thrust of the issue was at first reduced to a partisan political shouting match. Some liberal bloggers seized on the fact that Premiere syndicates the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. While this is notable because they're the top three rated radio talk show hosts, their relation to Premiere in no way implicates them as clients of Premiere On Call any more than any other radio show syndicated by any other broadcaster. Premiere On Call is not an in house service but is available to anyone, regardless of their political bent.
And the right wing counter provided more misdirection and contradiction highlighted by Rush Limbaugh's response. Limbaugh called out Tablet as a "radical, left-wing operation" only minutes after speaking out against the practice himself. Apparently, even if you agree with your ideological opponent these days you must marginalize his views and insult him before saying so.
Still others commenting see this as a non-story, declaring that they've always assumed this practice exists and that fake callers are easy to identify. This reasoning is spurious at best. The morality of willfully trying to get an audience to believe something that's not true isn't judged on how successful or not the scam is, it's judged by the intent. And the intent is to deceive. The danger of Premiere On Call's operation isn't in its potential use in satire and it's not in the calls that are, to some ears, clearly staged. It's in the ones that no one realizes are fake.
Gawker reported on a similar service offered by the radio programming company, United Stations Radio Networks, which was co-founded by Dick Clark. An actor only identified by the first name Bert was paid to call into a radio show to portray himself as a pilot and aviation expert in order to comment on a recent plane crash. A deceptive prank is one thing, willfully misinforming the public another. And though Premiere has said that they only hire out actors as fake callers for talk radio, not for news shows, how reassuring is that when the two at least seem to constantly overlap?
Radio callers more than bloggers and any participant in visual media thrive on anonymity. Their comments fall anywhere in the spectrum from thoughtful argument to bathroom wall graffiti. But the sum of it creates a reality that, to the vast listening audience, seems to represent more than the voice of a handful of individual callers. Listeners reflexively extrapolate a single voice into the imagined reality of a global chorus. I, for one, don't see the wisdom in accepting a reality without knowing what percentage of it is fabricated in order to fit a certain agenda, whether that agenda is political or merely to entertain.
In terms of the performer's role, acting is an art form most valuable for illuminating truths, not purposefully obscuring them. Acting when no one knows you're acting is generally called lying, regardless of compensation. And since the law doesn't draw this moral line, the actor must do so for himself.