MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR NEWS, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michelle Norris.
Thursday is the day we read from your e-mail.
BLOCK: And with lots of political news, we've received quite a few comments on our political coverage. So that's where we'll start.
NORRIS: John Becker(ph) of Oakdale, Minnesota was unhappy with our interview with Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.
BLOCK: I don't like Mayor Giuliani at all, Becker writes, but the way Robert Siegel bantered him made me feel sympathy for poor Rudy. Sure, he was unresponsive, but your audience is sufficiently sophisticated to pick up on that. Recent interviews with Barack Obama and Fred Thompson were excellent because they gave us personal portraits. And if a candidate wants to waste his conversation time constantly evading issues and fussing(ph) about his record, that tells us something too. No doubt this is frustrating for the interviewer, but just let him talk. We'll figure it out.
NORRIS: My story about conservative voters in South Carolina last week brought a number of e-mails, all asking about the absence of any talk about Republican candidate, Ron Paul.
BLOCK: This is from Christopher Harley(ph) of Portland, Oregon. Did you purposely exclude Ron Paul to create a vacuum in the story that purports to describe the lack of true conservatism in the upcoming presidential election? Shame on you, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm a conservative voter, and I seldom go a day without tuning in to NPR programming. I've always thought it's my duty to contribute to your organization's distinctively objective character. Your blatant omission of Ron Paul has sullied your once good name.
NORRIS: And we've got many more e-mails like that. Turning to our coverage of the economy, Tom Hester(ph) of Silver City, New Mexico was happy to hear my discussion with former treasury secretary Robert Rubin. A first-class interview, Hester writes, the most perceptive question was that if Mr. Rubin, as a leader of Citigroup, felt any responsibility for the subprime crisis. And Hester says he found this part of Rubin's answer particularly revealing.
Mr. ROBERT RUBIN (Chairman and CEO, Citigroup; Former Treasury Secretary): If you're running trading rooms, you've got to run them every day and you've got to be in the business every day. And the kinds of views that the others have around you, that kind may play a factor into what you're doing. But fundamentally, you can't go out of business and you can't stop doing business, and that's how the system just keep - continues to move along that way. Also, you know, you can't be wrong about those judgments.
BLOCK: Here's what Tom Hester took away from that. He writes, Mr. Rubin gave an answer he thought somehow absolved him of responsibility, and yet actually established his culpability. You know mortgage vendors are cooking data to qualify homebuyers and obscuring the amount that buyers will owe after the teaser rates are reset. But because you played a game, you don't have to do anything to stop the fraud and misdirection and untruth.
NORRIS: A number of various listeners heard a small untruth yesterday in our conversation with NPR's Daniel Zwerdling from the South Pole.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: There's nobody. I mean, there's nothing. There are not - there aren't caribou herds that wander pass. There aren't polar bears. There aren't penguins. This is an empty wilderness. It is an amazing feeling to be standing here.
BLOCK: Well, Chad Skaggs(ph) of Decatur, Georgia and many others were quick to point out that there are no polar bears or caribou in the Antarctic, but you would find them in the Arctic. We'll forgive Danny, Michelle. He must have been very excited to be there in the South Pole.
NORRIS: No kidding. And while we're in that forgiving mood, we're joined by a very contrite Bob Mondello. He's a movie critic. And he's here in the studio. And Bob, how long has it been since your last correction?
BOB MONDELLO: Well, probably since the last time I talked about anything remotely technical. And that was the problem here. I was talking about "U2 3D". And I was talking about the process that's used to make 3D images. And I suggested in my piece that the polarizing of the lenses is what is different now. And I talked about the old red-green or red-blue glasses that we got with - the cardboard ones that we used to wear in the '50s. Well, apparently, we didn't wear those in the '50s for movies. We wore those to look at comic book images, and things like that, that were printed that way. And they actually distributed them in comic books.
The glasses that we used for movies were polarized back then. They were in a - that whole process was invented by Dr. Edward Land of Polaroid fame way back in the 1930s, and it's been used all along. What this process uses in the IMAX theatres is much more sophisticated than the old ones. And it really - I mean, the 3D effect is astonishing, it's really cool to watch.
We got an e-mail from Peter Anderson, the 3D director of photography on "U2 3D," to correct us on this. And I had spent about 15 minutes talking to him, and I can now do a 17-minute speech about this process. Essentially, this process uses two prints, two lenses, in the IMAX theatres, two lamp houses, and projects the images on the screen. There's going to be another process, this is shown in a second kind of theatre very shortly, and there's going to be a third process later that is a little bit more like the anaglyphic 3D that I was describing - the red-blue lens. But in any event, this is a marked advance. The way that I was remembering is probably from "Sports Illustrated" swimsuit issues and things like that.
BLOCK: Well, thanks for clearing that up. And that correction from somebody who should know. Bob, thanks a lot.
MONDELLO: Thank you.
BLOCK: Whether we've got it wrong or right, if you're impressed or displeased, we want to hear from you. Go to npr.org and click on Contact Us at the top of the page.