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640's Ben Mulroney Taken In By April Fool - After He Made It A Topic
There's nothing quite like putting up an April Fool's story - only to have another member of the media fall for it hook, line and sinker. That's what happened to AM 640's Ben Mulroney on Tuesday, after he was shown a story from BlogTO about a restaurant that lets staff tell patrons how much they have to tip.
Mulroney was livid about the idea, and how tipping itself has gone out of control. So he devoted a entire block of time talking about it during his show and taking calls of outrage from equally fooled listeners. It wasn't until he saw the French name of the supposed diner - Revoir le Calendrier - that it finally dawned on him the whole thing was a fake. (It means "Look at the Calendar.")
Alex Pierson also got taken, although not on air. She walked into the station to find her producer, Mike Drolet, on the phone with the program director, telling him which topics and segments she was no longer allowed to do - all of which she had prepared for and which would have forced her to start her show with nothing planned. He quickly revealed it was an April 1st joke.
And at first, she was not amused!
We used to play jokes on listeners, not on each other. But times, as they say, have changed.
- newsguy1
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Re: 640's Ben Mulroney Taken In By April Fool - After He Made It A Topic
I am not a big fan of practical jokes, but I still laugh at the great one I believe used on CFTR years ago.
A news story was about how Canada was switching to "metric time."
If I remember the story interviewed an expert who described in great detail how to convert regular time into metric time.
The other one I remember was when a news story told listeners to put a plastic bag around their home phones for the day because the phone company was going to be blowing the dust out of the phone lines and it didn't want people's homes to get all dirty.
And of course there was perhaps the greatest hoax of all time.
The BBC "documentary" about how Italians harvested spaghetti each year from the spaghetti trees.
Another great one was when the Toronto Star published a very convincing story complete with technical drawings about how the city was going to add to the height of the CN Tower by cutting off part of it and moving in a new section using a helicopter.
The Canadian Press actually fell for the story and put it out on their wire service.
This established a routine that stands to this day where Management at CP put out a memo reminding editors about April Fools, and not to publish any story that sounds even remotely fishy.
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Re: 640's Ben Mulroney Taken In By April Fool - After He Made It A Topic
newsguy1 wrote:
I am not a big fan of practical jokes, but I still laugh at the great one I believe used on CFTR years ago.
A news story was about how Canada was switching to "metric time."
If I remember the story interviewed an expert who described in great detail how to convert regular time into metric time.
You can hear it here. It's still great and the "expert" who tries to explain things is brilliant. Not sure who that was, but he played the part perfectly.
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Thread Starter- RadioAaron
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Re: 640's Ben Mulroney Taken In By April Fool - After He Made It A Topic
Back when I had to do a lot of “time math” for broadcast purposes, I would have loved metric time.
- Chrisphen
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Re: 640's Ben Mulroney Taken In By April Fool - After He Made It A Topic
Is the Mulroney fuckup online?