After I wrote about KMBC-TV's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night, John Landsberg of Bottom Line Communications sent along the rest of the story: An embarrassing moment when KMBC news anchor Larry Moore was pranked by a caller claiming to be a janitor at the gasoline plant that caught fire during Channel 9's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night:
Ah, Baba Booey. Time for another flashback.
In 1996, just before I joined this newspaper, I wrote this piece for my Late Show News e-letter about the weird practice of putting unverified callers on live television. It stemmed from an incident that occurred on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" when producers there put a live call on the air claiming to be from the mayor of Philadelphia, who had been in the audience the day before. In fact, the caller was Captain Janks, the notorious prank caller and member of radio jock Howard Stern's "Wack Pack," who seems to have never met a call screener he couldn't talk his way past. Janks called O'Donnell a "fat pig," and hung up.
Janks, who has gotten on CNN and MSNBC multiple times, as well as the Jerry Lewis telethon and countless local broadcasts, is in fact captain of a small army of mischief makers devoted to two things: the Stern show and disrupting breaking-news telecasts across the country. These listeners call into the newsroom — not hard, since most after-hours switchboards at TV stations will transfer you to the assignment desk with the press of a button — and from there it is, I guess, shockingly easy to get on the air. Their rebel cry is "Baba Booey!", the nickname of Stern's longtime producer Gary Dell'Abate.
Unfortunately for our Kansas City prank caller, he was upstaged that very same night by troublemakers in San Diego who managed to drive by and disrupt two live shots on local TV stations with their "Baba Booey!" cheers. Stern played the clips on his Sirius Satellite Radio show the next day and gave the pranksters his highest praise. As faithful show recapper Marksfriggin.com described it, Stern "said he loves when people do the Baba Booey thing. He said that if he was lucky enough to be walking by he'd do it and he'd say 'Baba Booey, Fafa Foohey...' "
Twice in recent weeks David Letterman's writers have worked "Baba Booey" references into Top Ten lists, so it's clear they love it, too. And you know, as a subversive activity, I do too. I mean, is there any godly reason why, in this day and age, news stations need to drag non-credentialed strangers onto the air? If a non-journalist sees or hears something interesting, LET THEM BLOG, and then the TV stations can link to that.
When I wrote about this phenomenon 12 years ago, a more serious matter was on my mind than just the "Rosie O'Donnell Show":
On the night that TWA Flight 800 went down, all of the New York stations broke in with special reports, and coverage continued for several minutes before returning to prime-time programs. Later, NBC 4 broke in again, with what it thought was an exclusive: a telephone interview with a Coast Guard official claiming to have information on the downed airliner. Of course, it was a Stern listener, and while one could definitely feel Chuck Scarborough's pain as he realized, on camera, he'd been hoodwinked, it is still a valid question whether we would be better informed by an actual Coast Guard official on that phone line. You didn't have to be a news director to know that little solid information would be available from the wreck until much later -- even a passenger list takes time to compile. But all reason seems to go out the window at NBC 4 and other stations when an "exclusive" is on the line.
And let's take this discussion beyond pranksters for a moment. Remember the Sago Mine news disaster? CNN's Anderson Cooper let anyone standing within 10 feet of him broadcast unconfirmed rumors of the miners' rescue — rumors that turned out to be horribly wrong. If anything, the Baba Booeys out there should serve as miners' canaries, early warning systems that little can be gained from putting strangers on the air, and much can be lost, credibility-wise.
Great article.
This is the finest illustration possible the errors of the media and what passes for newz in todays society
Posted by: Ted | June 07, 2008 at 01:01 PM
BABA BOOEY! BABA BOOEY!!!
Had to do it, sorry. Good story. Television news is a joke. All of the anchors are robots, th weather people think they're rock stars (Especially here in Kansas City - Katie Horner anyone?), and their "Breaking News" and "Live Coverage" stories are a joke. If you wake up in the morning here in KC and turn on the TV they'll have "Breaking News" almost daily of stupid things that happened during the night like a gas station robbery that happened at Midnight, like 8 hours ago. That's not breaking news anymore. Don't get me started on the traffic copters that have started giving live air shots of thunderstorms and following them in the air through the city hoping for that million dollar shot of a tornado actually forming and happening. Oooooooohhhhh, wow, as if that's the most important thing in th world we need to see.
Let me wrap this up again by saying...
BABA BOOEY BABA BOOEY!!!
Posted by: Sternfan | June 16, 2008 at 07:08 AM