Tom Scott conducted the interview. WELI killed it. Now you can hear it.Scott, one of Connecticut's leading conservative voices of the past three decades, was the last local on-air voice at WELI-AM, once a fully-staffed Greater New Haven news station . Scott hosted a weekday 5 to 7 p.m. drive-time talk show until Oct. 29. That was the day he taped a combative interview with U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut.
The interview focused on two controversies that have dogged Dodd recently: He received personal "VIP" loans from Countrywide Financial, a predatory lender he was supposed to be regulating as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. And he helped craft a $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill designed to spur new small-business and homeowner lending -- but which turns out to be designed instead to enable banks to buy other banks.
Watching the TV news monitors in the WELI newsroom, Tom Scott (pictured), a former state senator and Congressional and gubernatorial candidate, had grown frustrated that reporters seemed to be going easy on Dodd. So he savored the chance to push Dodd on why, for instance, he won't release the documents connected to his personal Countrywide loans.
The result was riveting radio. But WELI's listeners never got to hear it.
Click here to hear the interview that never aired.
Asked why the interview never ran, Todd Thomas, Clear Channel's regional operations manager, said, "That's something that happened behind closed doors." He declined to comment further.