ar arrr arrrr!

Oh forget chuckling, this is funny.
HAHAHAHAHA! 
I promised myself I would not write about  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed again. There has been another blunder by Premise Media, PR firm and producers while attempting to address the last one that resulted in an enormous amount of coverage in all kinds of blog communities. The fur and the fudging is flying again.  Here are the Alexa traffic details in this ongoing back and forth.

March 28th Premise Media, it’s PR company and producers decided to have a conference call to address some of the negative recent publicity they received after expelling Dr. PZ Myers from a Minneapolis screening.  Members of the science blog The Panda’s Thumb were invited to listen in. Someone at the Premise Media location let slip the call in number prior to the scripted conversation starting.

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that’s the way they work.

So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)

Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.

They repeated the usual lies (the Minneapolis event was a private screening [which was publicly linked on the web, where any idiot could get to it]; their blog was #1 on blogpulse [near as I can tell, it wasn't—it was my exposure of their hypocrisy that was #1]; they didn’t lie to get interviews [totally bogus], etc.). They made amusing contradictions. Walt Ruloff first claims that the genesis of the movie was in 2006, when he claims to have started investigating biotechnology and discovered that there are “questions that can’t be asked” and that people were suppressing information that called Darwinism into doubt — note, though, that he never stated what those unnameable questions are. A moment later Mark Mathis comes on to say that the subject of the film was a work in progress, that they hadn’t settled anything, and that the name wasn’t even decided upon. Come on, they registered expelledthemovie.com in early 2007, well before they asked us to be interviewed.

I did a tax call in show once and as per courtesy and procedure called the guest 15 minutes before air. Taking a few minutes to get aquainted and relax with the tax-expert on that day is normal procedure. 
I wasn’t being humble, as we chatted I freely acknowledged my ignorance knowing nothing about taxes, admitted I had too few questions for the hour and expressed hope callers would respond as they had to this guest previously - experience was we wouldn’t be able to take all the calls.

While we joked about having enough coffee I noticed the engineers scrambling in master control but didn’t think anything of it.  As we went to air, the staff announcer told me the phone lines weren’t working (in talkback) and suggested I stretch. I started to sweat  wondering if the phone issues would be resolved, unaware of a bigger problem.
It was over 20 minutes into the show before we were able to take a call.  I was pushing my limits, stretching the talk, hoping too much coffee wasn’t going to get me more hyped up than I already was.  A station staff member kept coming into the booth to make sure my cup was topped up.:^)

After the show was over I was told by management something had gotten stuck and our pre-show conversation, commercial and PSA break chatter  went to air.
Something had been  jammed open and safeguards failed. 
I panicked, wondering if I’d said something spectacularly stupid. 

After the show newsroom phone began to ring, and the station receptionist passed on messages.  The engineers were understandably upset they were unable fix the problem faster, the staff announcer had sweated it as he handled the tech end of the show.
To the surprise of all of us involved, the audience loved the candid unplanned prep and getting acquainted chatter they’d heard. “You were kind and funny.” “You two came across like you were sitting in my kitchen.” “You talked like old friends.” ”That was more fun than taxes,” etc.
For weeks in the field people walked up to me with positive and warm feedback.
Compliments are very rare in media, shooting the messenger is a norm.
I’d never want it to happen again but it certainly reinforced something I knew from the first day I went on air - never assume a mike or camera isn’t live. 
I didn’t hear from annoyed listeners. That’s very unusual.
Compliments in the media business are very rare, 98% of calls are complaints from people who have heard what they think they’ve heard, not what’s been said.  Callers are annoyed, angry, upset, impatient, stressed and sometimes unbalanced.  
Shooting the messenger goes with the job.
With the snafus in this tax show I got lucky and re-learned a valuable lesson.

Not so for Dr. Myers.  Canadian Creationist Denyse O’Leary uses the ID Institute blog, Uncommon Descent to say: PZ Myers sneaks into press conference.

The Pharyngula link gives plenty of repudiation posts to ID and the Expelled claims, as well as some links to other blogs reporting the phone press conference.

Hollywood Jesus live blogged, and was fair, making corrections, interacting with commenters, and deserves credit for not pushing an agenda.
You can make up your own mind about how this was handled, here is the Myers/Premise media conference call conversation with some LOLCat pics up at YouTube.

Legalities are being discussed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars on whether presentation lines being used by invited listeners is legal in the US.  Either way saying Dr. Myers did some more ”sneaking in” under false pretenses just doesn’t work twice. Once again, Premise Media didn’t handle the unexpected well.

The film promotion isn’t going well either according to The Austringer
Thinking Christian - “Frankly, in view of the way Myers speaks about his opponents on his blog, I would be inclined not to invite him in to a private discussion too.”

Previous posts and background: Mark Mathis The Premise of Feeding the Beast and Expelled
Richard Dawkins on Expelled
Evolutionary Biologist expelled from Expelled
Traditional media is starting to pick up the Myers/Premise media story, the blog burst has been newsworthy