Dees Goes to Court to Tweak Simpson ‘Media Circus’ : Radio: The KIIS deejay will broadcast his show from the steps of the Criminal Courts Building to poke fun at coverage focused on titillating details.

In an attempt to demonstrate that media coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial has turned loonier than a three-ring circus, Rick Dees, accompanied by the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and performers from Circus Vargas, will broadcast his KIIS-FM (102.7) morning show from the steps of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles today.

Paul Joseph, Dees’ producer, said that the live five-hour show, beginning at 5 a.m., is a one-time event designed to poke fun at all the media from around the country and the world that will be on hand today as jury selection for the celebrated trial commences.

“Our hope is to point out how crazy the whole thing has become,” Joseph said. “We’ll be commenting not on the trial, but on the media, all the reporters from every two-bit station in the country who are here, to see how they really feel. To see if they are just as sick of it and yet sucked into it as we are.”

Joseph said that the decision to broadcast from the courthouse comes in response to the incessant interest of the show’s listeners to every development in the story--a case of giving the people what they want. But he denied that the program was having it both ways: making fun of the hoopla while piling on itself.

“I think if we were down there every day, you could say that then we were a part of the circus. But this is just once,” he said. “Believe me, I wish it were all over with. I wish our listeners were interested in some other kinds of comedy. I wish (today) was the last day of this thing, not the first.”

*

Dees is likely to be the only host of a local radio show on hand live today. Local talk-radio stations said they will cover the story with news reports for now, rather than originating entire programs from the site.

But Dees will have radio company. KROQ-FM (106.7) probably won’t send its morning team of Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter to the court, but it will have some of the program’s regular cast of characters--including loud-mouthed, megaphone-wielding prankster “Michael the Maintenance Man”--on hand to stir things up, possibly to mock Dees, one of their favorite targets.

“We never make fun of the murders or the judicial process,” said Kevin Weatherly, KROQ’s programming director, in response to questions about whether turning a tragedy into throwaway radio jokes is in bad taste.

*

“We’re there to mock the spectacle,” he said. “To make fun of ourselves and what this has become. Like the T-shirt vendors and every news channel and ‘Hard Copy’ and the tabloids all scrambling to get the dirt: That’s what is humorous. The news part of it is not what we are there to mock.”

The Simpson case as sport or spoof continues in prime-time tonight as both “Murphy Brown” and “Love & War” air tied-together episodes of a story obviously inspired by recent events.

In CBS’ “Murphy Brown” at 9 p.m., a famous astronaut is charged with murdering his brother and flees with police in pursuit on the New Jersey Turnpike. Meanwhile, Murphy and her news colleagues begin to investigate every angle during a live broadcast in which they find nothing much to report.

Following at 9:30 p.m., the “Love & War” gang sits around the bar watching television and wisecracking as the astronaut leads police in a car chase down the highway.

And on Thursday, a freeway pursuit again becomes comic fodder on NBC’s “Seinfeld” as the character Kramer helps a former baseball star flee from police in the wake of a brutal crime.