Thanks to an
ingenious St. Paul area resident, on Monday morning CBS broadcast an
anti-Gumbel message on Gumbel’s very own Early Show, MRC analyst Brian
Boyd noticed. Viewers who watched a live report from a St. Paul café
closely saw a sign which proclaimed:
"MR. GUMBEL
WITH YOUR BIASED REPORTS
YOU’LL SOON BE
IRRELEVANT"
The home-made sign came into play during a live shot of Hattie Kaufmann with a "Pulse of the Nation" segment just past 8am, a segment introduced by Gumbel. She checked in live from the Keys Café in St. Paul, Minnesota, the state with the highest voter turnout. She went table to table to get reaction to the ongoing presidential battle. One man told her they shouldn’t include the hand count and a waitress argued the whole state of Florida should re-vote.
Kaufman then sat down in a booth with man holding a folded up American flag. He held up the Esquire cover of Clinton and bemoaned: "I’ve had a belly full of this." Kaufmann asked: "Belly full of Clinton?" The man replied: "Not just Clinton. Clinton-Gore for eight years. Enough already. Call this election the way it was called in the first place. There have been counts and recounts. Enough."
During this sit down, a person in the adjacent booth
just behind and to the right of Kaufman and the man held up a hand-written
sign in multiple magic marker colors, which announced:
"MR. GUMBEL
WELCOME
TO"
The last line was cut off, but you could see: "TH-COUN," so it may have been "TRUTH COUNTRY."
The sign holder soon showed that the bottom half of
the sign was written on what was actually a lower part folded up as he or
she flipped down the bottom half and viewers could briefly make out:
"YOU’LL SOON BE
IRRELEVANT"
Then, as the sign holder lowered the sign you could see that above that it charged: "WITH YOUR BIASED REPORTS"
In a RealPlayer-size screen it will be hard to see, but I’ll work with MRC Webmaster Andy Szul too see if we can at least get a still shot up of it -- maybe as a holiday weekend treat to be posted late Tuesday or on Wednesday. Check this item in the posted version of this CyberAlert.
Even if it only lasts a few seconds, this message got more air time on CBS than did the letters "RATS" in that Bush ad.
-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), November 25, 2000