April 13, 2010 12:42 AM UTC

Questions for Norton filtered on conservative talk-radio show

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• by: Jason Salzman

(Worth noting, not really surprising – promoted by Colorado Pols)

You know talk radio shows filter out unwanted questions and stop unwanted callers from getting on the air.

There’s the mute button, which the host can use to silence a caller with the tap of a finger.

And there’s the person (the producer or possibly the host herself) who fields the calls asks about the topic of the call.

But Ross Kaminsky, the host on Backbone radio http://backboneamerica.net/ yesterday, took call-filtering to the next level by asking his listeners to submit questions for his review. Then, he said, he’d select “at least one of them” to present to Republican U.S. candidate Jane Norton, who was featured in the last segment of his show.

By asking and selecting questions himself, Kaminsky eliminated the remote chance that a caller would get on their air and ask a question that Kaminsky didn’t want asked.

I asked Kaminsky if this take-no-questions-directly-from-callers arrangement was orchestrated in advance with the Norton campaign.

Kaminsky said it was not.

“The reason that I did was not in the interest of filtering,” he told me. “It was for time management. Frequently what happens is you get a caller and they spend one or two minutes with a preamble to their question. When I only have a total of about 17 minutes with a candidate what I have found is that too much time gets wasted. The intent of my approach was time management not filtering particular questions.”

I actually thought Kaminsky was gentle with Norton, but I’ll discuss this in my next post.

But tough questions aside, Kaminsky’s heavy approach to filtering questions was out of step with the way most talk-radio hosts conduct interviews. Conservative and liberal talk-show hosts allow callers to question candidates and politicians directly, and it usually makes for more engaging talk radio. The callers are often the best part of these shows, not the hosts.

“They [other talk-radio hosts] usually have much more time with a candidate than I had [with Norton], It’s a lot easier to take callers’ questions when you’ve got a candidate for an hour or two, or you know they are going to be on frequently.”

Plus, he said, he asked Norton every question he got.

By setting up his question-filtration system, Kaminsky makes his show smell bad.  That’s for sure.

Just like The Denver Post looks bad for publishing just one article in the last 27 weeks with a Norton quotation, obtained in an actual exchange with a reporter.