Media Triple Play

I did Jeff Santos' radio show again Wednesday morning. The podcast is here. My antics start about 35 minutes in. You can slide the marker approximately halfway through and then guesstimate from there.

In other non-me news, Chris draws attention to the campaign to get Rick Scott's fear-mongering infomercial off NBC:

Progressive health care reform groups demanded on Thursday that Washington’s NBC television affiliate refuse to air a 30-minute infomercial funded by a conservative group opposed to creating a public insurance plan.

The Service Employees International Union sent a letter to NBC4, arguing that the station has a responsibility to pull the documentary-style commercial paid for by Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. The ad, set to run Sunday after “Meet the Press,” “will be false, deceitful, and a distortion,” the union’s attorney wrote in the letter.

The SEIU has not seen the ad, but is drawing the conclusion from CPR’s record of running “demonstrably false” ads. The station has the duty to protect the public from misleading advertising, the letter argues.

If the ad is aired and does contain falsehoods, CPR could face a fine from the Federal Communications Commission, said Levana Layendecker, the online campaigns director for Health Care for America Now, a coalition pushing to create a public insurance plan.

The coalition, Democracy for America and the SEIU e-mailed their supporters, asking them to sign on to another letter that urges NBC and “Meet the Press” to refuse to air the infomercial. The groups plan to send another e-mail Friday to Washington-area supporters, rallying them to call the station with the same message.

Layendecker said the commercial would demean the venerable public-affairs show’s brand. At the very least, the station should run a crawler under the ad, indicating that the program is a paid advertisement and not endorsed by NBC, she said.

And Think Progress has a new video up called "Who is Rick Scott?" It draws from his past at the center of the Columbia/HCA hospital fraud scandal in the late 90s. Take a look: