New York, JANUARY 12 Bitch. Dirty rat eater. I’ll choke the **** out of you.’’ These were not expletives exchanged at a drunken brawl outside a bar but words spoken to a call centre worker in India who became an unwitting victim of a supposedly jocular routine on a radio show hosted by two shock jocks.
The entire conversation was broadcast live and was later placed on the station’s website as an audio clip. The station — WUSL-FM (Power 99) in Philadelphia — today bowed to community uproar and castigated the two African American shock jocks, Star and Buc Wild, who in the past have been fired from another show in New York for making fun of the singer Aaliyah.
The station also have pulled the audio clip off the website, conceding it was ‘‘racially inflammatory’’ and reprimanded the employee who put it up on the web. The station also plans to post an apology on their site. However, the clip continued to be posted on blogs.
On the clip, part of a daily show, Star posed as a White father trying to buy ‘‘quick beads’’ so his six-year-old daughter could look like tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.
It is not known if the call was made knowing that it was going to be directed to India, but after learning his query had been answered by a call centre in India, Star started to rant abuses, even as the woman told him the call would be disconnected if he continued to use offensive language.
After a spurt of angry e-mails and phone calls, including from advocacy groups who were appalled at the racist and misogynistic nature of the call, the station finally took serious note of the broadcast, and is now trying to make amends, saying such an incident will not happen again.
In an e-mail, Devalina Guha-Roy, who teaches at a Head Start programme in Philadelphia, advocated action against the station and called the crank call ‘‘outright racism’’.
Reports said station managers have had ‘‘extensive discussions’’ since learning about the clip, with Star, whose real name is Troi Torain, and Buc Wild, his half-brother, Timothy Joseph. The Star and Buc Wild show, which started three months ago, is also syndicated in Hartford, Connecticut, and Augusta, Georgia, and is to return to New York this month, on WWPR-FM. The two aired in New York from 2000 to 2003 and were suspended after Star made fun of the death of singer Aaliyah in a plane crash.
Interestingly, Power 99 is owned by Clear Channel Communications, which adopted a ‘‘zero-tolerance’’ policy last year, dropping the most famous shock jock in America, Howard Stern, and paying a record $1.75 million fine for indecency.