Media Prank - Interview with Jimmy Carter | Senserely Yours,

Media Prank - Interview with Jimmy Carter

In 2001 Michael Enright, host of the Sunday Edition of the Canadian Broadcasting Corpation’s radio program This Morning, interviewed former President Jimmy Carter on the air. The interview concerned Canada’s heavily subsidized softwood lumber industry, about which Carter had recently written an editorial piece in The New York Times. The interview took a turn for the worse when Enright began telling Carter to speed up his answers.

Michael Enright

Then Enright asked, “I think the question on everyone’s mind is, how did a washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville such as yourself get involved in such a sophisticated bilateral trade argument?” Carter seemed stunned by the insult. Finally he replied, “Excuse me? A washed-up peanut farmer? You’re one to talk, sir. Didn’t you used to be on the air five times a week?” The tone of the interview did not improve from there. Carter ended up calling Enright a “rude person” before he hung up.

President Jimmy Carter

Enright then revealed that the interview had been fake. The Toronto comedian Ray Landry had been impersonating Carter’s voice. The interview generated a number of angry calls from listeners who didn’t find the joke funny. But the next day the controversy reached even larger proportions when the Globe and Mail reported the interview as fact on their front pages. The editor of the Globe and Mail later explained that he hadn’t realized the interview was a hoax because it was “a fairly strange issue and a strange person to choose as a spoof.”

Buck Shinkman, a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, said he heard the interview and realized it was a hoax. It just didn’t sound like Mr. Carter, said Mr. Shinkman. “Then the line of questioning very quickly made it clear to me that it wasn’t and I thought it wasn’t funny and not particularly clever so I just turned it off.”

Mr. Enright said he meant no disrespect for Mr. Carter, a man whom he describes as being both very sweet and very smart. But the radio host is unrepentant. “One doesn’t want to apologize because we did it in a particular way or whatever,” Mr. Enright said. “I don’t understand how the national newspaper could have missed (the fact that it was a hoax).”

Some critics said it’s wrong for the media to try to fool the public, even on April 1.

“If you’re going to pull pranks like this you have to make damn sure that people realize that it is a prank,” said Klaus Pohle, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. To do otherwise is simply not ethical, he said, calling the stunt sophomoric.

“It doesn’t paint anybody in the best light and it damages the credibility of the CBC and journalism as a whole,” said Mr. Pohle. “If your listeners can’t believe what they’re hearing, regardless of whether it’s April 1 or July 1, where are you?”

Additional Reading:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/comments/888/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20010402.wapril0402/BNPrint/Front/
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/216401/9