The Merry Pranksters of the Air

What if ... ? wondered Cleveland disc jockey Shane French. What if a cat was tethered to a helium-filled balloon and launched toward the heavens, and callers to his station offered periodic reports, and finally, one gallant listener fired a gun, popped the balloon and brought the cat down gently. Would that be great radio or what?

It’s what passes for great radio these days. On April 29, French kept the hoax going for more than two hours, fueled by recorded “calls” from “witnesses.” It ended when police, suspecting a hoax after so many worried inquiries from animal lovers, visited the station and persuaded French to announce that none of it was true.

Nine days later, a Denver-area radio station copied the hoax and was delighted by the same results: a bigger, longer-listening audience and coverage on local television and in newspapers -- easily worth the complaints of the offended.

Hoaxes, pranks and stunts have been part of radio for generations, back to the granddaddy of them all, Orson Welles’ 1938 Martians-invade-New Jersey broadcast, based on H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” which inadvertently created widespread panic. There’s rarely anything inadvertent in today’s broadcast stunts, which feature an uneven variety of edgy cleverness and malicious manipulation. Radio stations with shrinking promotional budgets but a desperate need to stand out in their conglomerate-dominated world have taken on-the-air goofery to new heights.

The mischief plays out on a largely deregulated landscape. The Federal Communications Commission has a 10-year-old rule banning hoaxes, but the rule has enough loopholes to exempt all but the most catastrophic incidents.

The agency’s 4-year-old Enforcement Bureau has never filed a hoax case. With prank- sterism -- mean, silly, sly or merely stupid -- unchecked in its merry romp across the nation’s airwaves, perpetrators and listeners are on their own to separate right from wrong, never mind real from fake.

The tension between civil order and 1st Amendment rights was well-illustrated by the Cleveland cat stunt. French, who goes by the nickname “Rover” on WXTM-FM 92.3 “Xtreme Radio,” said he never considered that people would call 911 when that “cat” took flight. But he was obsessed with jolting his morning drive-time audience.

“Our listeners really have an expectation of waking up in the morning and saying, ‘I can’t believe this is going on,’ ” said French, 27. “For 30 years, this is what radio has striven to do.” No one in his right mind would take the hoax literally, figured French’s boss, program director Kim Monroe.

But scores of people called the Cleveland Animal Protective League, which pulled its cruelty investigator off other cases and sent him looking for the flying cat. Not only did the league waste resources, but the hoax put a dangerous idea into the minds of teens and young adults, the organization’s president complained to Infinity Broadcasting Corp., which owns 2-year-old WXTM and about 180 other stations. In Monroe’s mind, only the backlash stopped it from being a perfect hoax. She still gives it “an 8 1/2 or 9 on a scale of 10.”

The same tension was raised by a Houston station’s April Fools’ broadcast that claimed Harris County was running so short of transportation funds that it would start charging tolls per “any breathing creature” -- including pets -- in the car, rather than the old per vehicle formula. The hoax provoked nonstop protest calls to the toll-road agency, which complained to the station. “It was the most e-mail we ever got,” boasted one station announcer.

More subtle was a New Orleans broadcast last fall. The host of a local politics show was interviewing a former federal prosecutor when, late in the program, came a phone call from former Louisiana Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, who was scheduled to enter federal prison that day after an extortion conviction.

The prosecutor had tried unsuccessfully to get a conviction against Edwards in the ‘80s. Now, Edwards said he wanted to explain himself to the public one last time. Bitter exchanges followed. Politics junkies phoned each other gleefully. Alas, “Edwards” was a local actor and impersonator -- a fact the show’s host realized when the call came in, and something he chose to play along with. (The prosecutor later said he’d done the same.)

What kind of hoax should be out of bounds? How about the Pennsylvania station that scheduled a Saturday morning appearance by Britney Spears three years ago. Four hundred children and parents, some of whom camped in the station’s parking lot overnight, turned tearful and angry when a limo pulled up and a tuxedo-clad man emerged carrying a Spears doll in a box. The station’s excuse? Listeners should have been able to read between the lines of its promotional language.

A similar ethos prevailed in Olathe, Kan., last year when disc jockeys warned listeners (on April 1) not to drink Olathe water because it contained dihydrogen monoxide -- the scientific name for water. The city threatened to complain to the FCC. (“It’s a terrorist act,” the city’s water superintendent complained after receiving 150 calls from customers). The station responded by offering $30,000 worth of airtime for local charities.

The easy winner for most wrong-minded radio hoax, contemporary division, goes to Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia -- better known as “Opie and Anthony” -- who falsely reported on a Boston station in 1998 (yep, on April 1) that the city’s mayor had been killed in an auto accident. They were fired, only to move to a New York station, where they were also signed to a national syndication deal -- a deal they would lose four years later with more bad judgment.

Phil Hendrie, whose nationally syndicated show on Los Angeles’ KFI-AM (640) is an endless joke -- a faux call-in show that consists of fictitious guests, all played by Hendrie -- says most radio hoaxes leave a bad taste in his mouth because they seem geared to simply anger the audience.

“The new era of radio is ‘How can I get their attention?’ Entertainers are getting pushed out of our business,” Hendrie said. “Amateurs are taking over the radio game.... It’s moving toward making lots of noise.... There’s a program director out there walking into his morning show saying, ‘We gotta do something to get you guys noticed, into the newspaper. I know! Let’s pretend like a woman got raped in the studio, or someone got murdered. Aren’t we funny, man?’ ”

Then there are pranks, less toxic than hoaxes, intended to fool a lone victim while the audience laughs at his plight.

Ask Hendrie to name a prank of theatrical value and he offers one that Los Angeles’ KROQ-FM (106.7) pulled just before the Iraq invasion began and tensions with the French government were high. The station’s Ralph Garman, impersonating Jerry Lewis (who is popular in France), phoned French President Jacques Chirac and held a brief, sympathetic conversation about France’s opposition to the war.

“They [toyed] with a guy [Chirac] who needed [toying] with, a great sendup on how myopic this guy is, and who does it hurt? Nobody,” Hendrie said. “What point does it make? A marvelous point about myopia and the egocentric nature of this French president.”

Alas, the French government has insisted that the person Garman talked to was not Chirac, Lewis’ attorney has threatened to sue and Garman says his bosses have told him not to talk about the matter, citing the possibility of litigation.

A pair of Spanish-language deejays in Miami had more success with the same shtick a couple of months before with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The deejays lured Chavez into a segment they call “Fidel’s Calling You,” in which they create Fidel Castro sentences by editing a tape of a 2001 conversation between Castro and Mexican President Vicente Fox. They talked Chavez’s aides into putting him on the phone, then peppered him with nonsensical Castro comments until he caught on.

Syndicated talk show host Howard Stern has played a key role in modern-day pranks by letting his fans do the dirty work.

For more than a decade, Stern has delighted in playing tapes of his fans’ tasteless calls to network anchors, in which they pretend to be eyewitnesses to breaking news events. In the mid-’90s, one radio convention included a panel on how to avoid these assaults.

But until networks employ something like a radio-style seven-second delay, no tips will stymie these kinds of high-profile deceptions:

* 1994: Peter Jennings is anchoring ABC’s coverage of the O.J. Simpson chase. As Simpson remains in his van outside his Brentwood home, a “neighbor” calls. ABC puts him on with Jennings. The “neighbor” answers several questions in an “Amos ‘n’ Andy”-like dialect, finally bidding adieu with the nickname of Stern’s producer.

* 1999: A Stern fan poses as a Coast Guard official during live coverage of the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane, making his way past call-screeners at CBS, ABC and MSNBC to utter live insults or shout out the producer’s nickname.

* 2003: Dan Rather is anchoring CBS’ coverage of the space shuttle Columbia disaster when a caller claims to have a piece of shuttle wreckage in his backyard that looked like the oversize teeth of Stern’s producer.

Stern justifies these pranks by saying they expose the clueless nature of the network anchors. But Janet McMullen, an associate professor in the University of North Alabama’s communications department who specializes in media ethics, says that’s a facile way to ignore right and wrong.

“We have this very selfish, self-focused behavior in general ... that says: ‘If it seems OK to me, it’s OK,’ ” she said.

Most likely to backfire on radio stations are publicity-seeking outside-the-studio stunts.

A San Francisco deejay put on an orange jail uniform and handcuffs and went door to door in suburban Millbrae in 2000, asking residents to helping him get the cuffs off. He was surrounded by officers with guns drawn, lost his job and eventually was sentenced to 45 days in jail for falsely causing an emergency to be reported. (Within two months, a Kansas City, Mo., station copied the stunt at a cheaper cost: 100 hours of community service for a deejay and a producer.)

A Philadelphia radio personality last year tried to stiff a restaurant on the air by paying with an IOU, leading to a 911 call. (The announcer, who was arrested but not prosecuted, brightly picked a pancake house that had been robbed at gunpoint two weeks earlier).

A Denver deejay twice dropped a live chicken from his station’s multistory office building, contending that there would be an early spring if the animal survived. The district attorney’s office, which received 500 letters of outrage from 42 states, won a misdemeanor animal-cruelty conviction requiring a fine, counseling and community service.

Two other Denver deejays in the mid-’90s arranged for a producer to enter an Islamic center and play a recording of the national anthem -- a stunt aimed at protesting a Muslim Denver Nugget player’s refusal to stand for the anthem before games.

But nothing matches what Opie and Anthony -- the guys who faked that Boston mayor’s death back in ’98 -- did last summer.

The jocks, by this time based in New York and syndicated in nearly 20 markets, held a contest offering a prize to listeners who had sex in public. They did on-the-air commentary while a couple purportedly had sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The outrage got them fired by Infinity, which owns the New York station. The lovers were criminally charged, the New York station dropped its shock-talk format in January, and the FCC has the case under review.

Where do you draw the line? Tom Leykis, whose L.A.-based sex-obsessed syndicated show temporarily took Opie and Anthony’s place in New York, draws a line between the Islamic center stunt and the cathedral stunt.

“I look at it in a very nuts-and-bolts way,” he said. “Did it attract listeners? Did it alienate advertisers? Did it cause bad will for the radio station?”

There weren’t enough Islamic listeners in Denver to make the station pay a significant public relations price, Leykis said.

By contrast, to pull a sex stunt inside a Catholic church in New York -- with a substantial, mobilized Catholic population -- was suicidal. “It’s not worth it ... Opie and Anthony already had an audience.”

According to their agent, radio has seen the last of Opie and Anthony. They’re looking for work in television these days.