Erich "Mancow" Muller, Talk Radio, Jennifer Strange Death

POT VS KETTLE

Longtime Shock Jock Calls For 'Responsibility'







This must be the week for counterintuitive publicity stunts!

Between libtalker Ed Schultz blasting Hillary Clinton and a new "responsi- bility" movement created by none other than shock- jock Mancow Muller, your Radio Equalizer must admit to having fallen for both hook, line and sinker.

In Mancow's case, it's a full- scale war between pot and kettle as the longtime morning host launches his Foundation For Responsible Radio, dedicated to cleansing the medium of antics such as the Entercom- sponsored contest that killed a young Sacramento mother of three.


And if one isn't familiar with his history, this might seem credible, but a look at the past proves he helped pave the way for radio's current sad state of affairs. For a notorious stunt that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, he's still hated in the Bay Area, even many years later:

Another bridge prank occurred in 1993, when a disc jockey for radio station KSOL - Manfred "Mancow" Muller - tied up traffic on the Bay Bridge by organizing vans to block all the westbound lanes while his sidekick, Jesus "Chuy'' Gomez, got a haircut.

The stunt was a parody of President Clinton's ill-timed haircut in Air Force One a week earlier, which blocked traffic on a Los Angeles International Airport runway for an hour. Muller was prosecuted and given three years' probation, 100 hours of community service and a $500 fine.

And, in a sworn deposition published by the Smoking Gun, fellow shock- jock Howard Stern claims Mancow sent him a box of fecal matter, in addition to having an assistant defecate in the lobby of Stern's building in front of two female employees.

More recently, Mancow has attempted to reinvent himself as a "conservative" commentator, which has earned him regular guest spots on the FOX News Channel. At the same time, his sloppy rhetoric has provided easy fodder for the left. So far, however, most on the right have ignored his attempts to gain political legitimacy.


In the end, the real lesson from recent events is that to gain substantial press attention as a radio personality, it takes a either a new degree of creativity and sophistication, or to descend to a depth so low that it kills a young mother of three.


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