I’ll quote Tom verbatim.
You know there’s stupid and then there’s stupid. But the decision-makers at Clear Channel owned Hot 97 have committed the year’s first Mega-Stupid Act (a new award we’ll be presenting at year end) by broadcasting a “parody” of the tsunami victims singing to the tune of “We Are The World” (see here for link). Their “apology” and MP3 removal aside, this is one of those moments that stops you in your tracks and forces you to think about what might be “too much?” Apparently, in the age of attention-gathering, when no publicity is bad publicity, folks lose their way.
Now, some of them should lose their jobs.
It’s great that someone preserved the MP3 evidence. I don’t know about people losing jobs. I’d prefer them to replace normal programming with a phone-in, [UPDATE: independently moderated], about what happened. I wonder about the thousands who listened to this each morning and didn’t think it mattered very much.
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