Lucky for us, Roy keeps a little journal just for himself. As anyone who has ever lived in or near a trailer park can tell you, the State Fair is a big event and it requires plenty of planning and not a little fundraising to properly celebrate the fair! Mercer’s latest book is all about the State Fair. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Weinstein.Roy D. His final CD, “Red, White and Bruised,” will be released next month by Capitol Nashville/EMI. His death was not related to the pranks he pulled, but it did galvanize people across the country to mourn the loss of a good-natured fellow whose practical jokes were both funny and respectful. On a sad note, Phil Stone, who helped to write much of Roy D. I call upon radio hosts, producers and station owners in every country to formally adopt the Do No Harm principle in their employment policies, so that incidents like the royal hoax can be avoided. But the public still has a right to demand that media professionals avoid doing or saying things that would reasonably cause others to feel humiliated or degraded. Even if many people do X, if doesn’t follow that X is right or good.ĭisc jockey Michael Christian may be correct that prank calls are part and parcel of radio programs around the world. Still, the fact that some or even a lot of people intentionally cause harm every day does not mean that Do No Harm is an unrealistic guideline for living responsibly. Even one of our most notable advocates of peace, Sir Paul McCartney, responded to 9/11 with a song whose chorus goes, “We will fight for the right to live in freedom.” Of course, terrorists, dictators and other despots violate the Do No Harm principle regularly, which is why it makes sense to speak of just wars. What would the world be like if we couldn’t be confident that people we encounter will not harm us, and that they will be punished if they willfully do so? No one would want to leave home, and as we learn from CNN daily, too many folks around the world live in such fear. Yet Do No Harm applies not just to health care providers but to radio personalities, their producers and everyone else. The Do No Harm principle is a bedrock of ethics courses every would-be medical, nursing, dental and pharmacy student must take to graduate. But at the very least, we can expect that they won’t make us worse. We associate this principle with health care professionals, and rightly so: We’d like our physicians to make us better. The ethical principle at the heart of this policy is simple: Do No Harm. Mercer model of prank calls: Let the person in on the joke before things spiral out of control. But this sad story should be a wake-up call for radio hosts around the world to follow the Roy D. Perhaps she was so troubled that the slightest upset would have brought about her tragic choice. Whether this would have prevented Saldhana’s suicide is hard to say. Rather, they erred in not letting the person who took the call know that the whole thing was a joke. The Australian DJs’ mistake was not the making of the call, which done artfully might indeed have been funny. Weinstein’s interview with Douglas and Stone Whatever the supposed injustice that Mercer encountered, the result was always the same: a request for an outrageous sum of money to right the wrong, followed by the threat of violence, and ending with the recipient of the call being informed that the whole thing was a ruse set up by a friend. From the moment I heard the first track, I was hooked, and I ended up playing every album more times than I can count – as my beleaguered wife will attest.įor samples of Mercer calls, click on menu’s “speed dial” The Mercer character has developed a huge following across the country through CDs sold at truck stops, but I’d never heard of him until a music subscription service recommended him after I listened to an album by Larry the Cable Guy. Everyone has a good laugh, and no one was worse for wear. Mercer’s outrageous demands for retribution quickly led to threats of an “a**-whuppin’,” but just as the person on the receiving end was about to blow his stack, Douglas and co-host Phil Stone let the patsy in on the joke.
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