Will KROQ Get Away With ‘Murder’? : Radio: The industry is waiting to see what action the FCC will take on the deejays’ hoax. Some are appalled by the stunt, others see it as competitive excess.

Some attribute it to a widespread decline in radio standards, others to creativity gone awry, a prank carried too far. Still others trace the motivation to plain old greed.

These are some of the reactions that radio industry officials have had to the revelation of an on-air murder-confession hoax concocted for publicity by three KROQ-FM (106.7) disc jockeys--morning personalities Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter and late-night host Doug Roberts. They were suspended without pay on April 11 following publication of an article about the scheme in The Times and are expected back on the air today.

The Federal Communications Commission says that it is investigating the incident, and the radio industry is watching closely to see what action, if any, the regulatory agency will take toward the station and the three deejays.

“I don’t think anybody’s scared at all about this until they see how the FCC reacts,” said Jeff Wyatt, program director at KPWR-FM (105.9). “If it amounts to a hand slap, a letter of reprimand, who cares? If it’s a letter of reprimand, (KPWR morning deejay) Jay Thomas is going to have a murderer on the air live tomorrow. If they do something drastic like take their license away, that’s a message. A $20,000 fine--that’s a message.”

Allen Klein, president of Media Research Graphics Inc., a radio consulting firm, agreed: “If there’s a slap on the wrist and everybody laughs about it, then it will happen again.”

It refers to the phony confession that Roberts called in to Ryder and Baxter last June, which led to a plethora of media appearances for the KROQ deejays and ultimately triggered a 10-month homicide investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. One of the shows on which the radio confession was replayed was “Unsolved Mysteries,” which ran the segment twice, generating about 400 responses linking the confession to real crimes.

“It was unconscionable,” Klein said. “My personal feeling is they should never work again on the air. How can you trust people like this? They had the opportunity to say it was a hoax in the early stages and didn’t. Who pays for all the man hours in the Police Department? And you’re dealing with people’s emotions and lives.”

Emotions indeed ran high when Lis Cummings learned that the on-air confession had been a fake. Cummings’ 19-year-old daughter, Angela, was fatally shot last year near Yuba City, and she had hoped that the call might provide clues that would lead to someone being arrested for the crime.

“I listened to the tape and it was a pretty chilling thing,” she recalled in a phone interview last week. “It was really creepy. You know how you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach? A feeling of how horrible that anybody could be so cold. . . . And then I felt hope that it was the person who killed Angela. I thought, ‘God, this really could be it. It would really fit in with a lot of things that happened.’ ” Cummings’ voice trailed off. “You grasp at anything. . . .”

When she learned this month that the murder confession was a phony, Cummings’ hopes were dashed.

“Someone that would do a hoax like this is just as sick as a murderer,” Cummings said. “You can’t care about anyone else’s feelings and do something like this. It’s just cold and it’s cruel.

“(The deejays) have obviously never had anything serious or painful happen in their lives,” she continued. “There are lots of other things that people can do for ratings that don’t hurt other people. This affected so many people’s lives. I felt like I became a victim again. This was like being slapped in the face again. When your child is murdered and it’s unsolved, it’s not done. What they did was like taking sandpaper and rubbing it in an open wound.”

Neither Ryder, Baxter nor Roberts returned telephone calls from The Times.

Several others in the industry, interviewed a week after the hoax was revealed, expressed outrage on behalf of people like Cummings, the innocent victims of the deejays’ ploy for ratings.

“Did they think these people’s pain was worth exploiting to get ratings?” said KLSX-FM (97.1) deejay Jim Ladd, a veteran deejay with 20 years at various Los Angeles radio stations. “It’s almost like a vampire who is sucking off the tragedy of America.”

But other industry veterans see the hoax as an unfortunate, but excusable, concomitant of the competitive world of morning radio.

“When you’re dealing with creative talent, you have to take what’s part and parcel to that--and sometimes that includes going too far,” said programming consultant Jeff Pollack, who currently consults for KQLZ-FM “Pirate Radio” (100.3).

“You have to understand that there are going to be some times where an idea that’s been created just goes wrong,” Pollack said. “I think they’re talented, they’re good guys and should be given another chance.”

Bill Summers, general manager of KLOS-FM (95.5), voiced similar sentiments.

“I don’t know how you can ward against things like that,” Summers said. “I think they went so far and they couldn’t get out. It’s like a kid who steals. All of a sudden you tell a lie and you have to tell another lie to get out of the first lie. I hope they get out of this OK. They’re good people.”

So far, it does seem the three deejays have escaped serious punishment. The morning duo, known as Kevin and Bean, apologized on the air the day after the incident was made public, as did KROQ General Manager Trip Reeb. Reeb has since said that he will stand by his employees out of loyalty and regard for their otherwise good performance.

“They were fairly inexperienced,” Reeb explained. “They had never done mornings before. . . . I think that you have to allow, if you have a show that pushes the boundaries, that a certain amount of this comes with the territory. Certainly the kind of thing that Kevin and Bean did does not even come close to being considered within the realm of things that come with the territory, but I think that smaller incidents--just from running a young persons’ station--will occur from time to time.”

Other Los Angeles radio personalities, however, scoffed at the notion that the stunt was a creative idea gone wayward.

“Creativity is putting songs together combined with an intelligent read on the songs that makes something happen to (the listener) that’s uplifting,” KLSX’s Ladd said. “What you have here is a gimmick. If they wanted to pull a stunt, why didn’t they pull a stunt that gets people thinking about oil spills or air pollution or feeding the homeless? Aren’t they creative enough to come up with something outrageous that has a point to it?”

Rick Dees, the popular morning deejay at KIIS-FM (102.7), said: “Hey, it was creative for a guy to go into McDonald’s and shoot people too. Nobody had ever done that before. But you have to draw the line somewhere.”

Both Dees and Ladd see the incident as indicative of an overall decline in radio, particularly morning radio.

“I think that morning radio has gotten to be one giant trash bin that we need to examine a little bit,” Dees said.

“This is the state that rock radio has gotten to,” Ladd said. “It’s a corporate money machine. The whole essence of FM radio was supposed to be to support life and positive change and the goodness of people. To stoop to such a sleazy level, to stoop to faking a murder confession to get another tenth of a (ratings) point, spits in the face of everything Bob Dylan and John Lennon and the Rolling Stones and U2 stand for.”

Wyatt, of dance music station KPWR--known for its own wacky “Morning Zoo” shows presided over by Jay Thomas--sees the antics of Kevin and Bean as part of a more dangerous disregard for on-air ethics.

“I think that radio more and more in the last two to five years has become less self-policing and it’s unfortunate for the medium as well as the listeners,” he said. “At all levels it just seems like there are an awful lot of ethics dropping out. It’s like nothing matters anymore.”

Most of those interviewed agreed that the revelations have brought publicity to a pair of morning personalities who were hardly household words. Ryder and Baxter’s morning show ranked 18th in the latest Arbitron ratings survey. KROQ-FM ranked 14th overall and general manager Reeb said that the morning program was the station’s “lowest-rated day part.”

“They couldn’t have bought press like this,” Wyatt said.

“Even if it costs the station hundreds of thousands of dollars in (FCC) fees, it’s well worth it,” said Bill Richards, KIIS program director. “Bad publicity is still publicity, and they’re getting a ton of it.”