Dan Rather space shuttle prank call

The video of this call is featured on this tape!

NY Post

2/4/03

Stern Laughs Along With Shuttle Phone Scam Sicko
By John Mainelli

Howard Stern claims he "cringed," but that didn't stop him from
playing a tape of a prankster's incredibly inappropriate live calls to
CBS and MSNBC moments after Saturday's space shuttle disaster.

Stern also didn't tell the phone scammer -- long-time show guest
"Captain Janks" (whose real name is Tom Cipriano) -- to stop making
such calls after playing the tape of this exchange with CBS's Dan
Rather:

CAPT. JANKS: "My name is Mike and I'm in Euliss, Texas, and a little
over an hour ago I heard a loud explosion and a big piece of what
appeared to be metal landed on my property. . . and there's a lot of
people here looking at it and they believe it's one of Baba Booey's
[Stern producer Gary Del'Abate's] teeth."

DAN RATHER: "A lot of people don't know where Euliss, Texas, is. From
Dallas, you're from what direction and where?"

CJ: "You're a real idiot, you know!"

DR: "That was a crank call and it's true I'm an idiot but that's
beside the point. There are some times when our system of keeping
these crank callers off the phone works and sometimes it doesn't. This
morning it didn't work."

Indeed, Janks told Stern-- who claimed he doesn't "condone" such
pranks-- that CBS insists on getting phone numbers and calling back
potential eyewitnesses at those numbers.

"I gave them my phone number here in Pennsylvania -- I mean, if I'm
from Texas, then why are they calling Pennsylvania?" he said.

The same call-back procedure was in place at MSNBC, where the
prankster had an earlier exchange -- this time posing as an actual
NASA spokesman -- also played on Stern's radio show yesterday:

Janks said he also tried to scam ABC, but was foiled because ABC now
pre-tapes such calls.

"You do have a sick mind, like in the middle of that tragedy to think:
'Gee this is an opportunity to make a phone call'," Stern told him.

"And it was a funny thought that it was one of Baba Booey's teeth, I
suppose, but yet it was just too depressing to do it.," Stern said.

************

Television News Tries To Keep Viewers Informed Amid Dearth Of Information
By DIANE TOROIAN Post-Dispatch
updated: 02/01/2003 09:59 PM

Dan Rather Is Subject to prank

National tragedies show the strengths and struggles of television news networks - the
strength to deliver information and pictures faster than their print and radio rivals and
the struggle to fill hours of uninterrupted coverage. The loss Saturday morning of the
space shuttle Columbia proved no different.

Networks quickly assembled experts, eyewitnesses and amateur video to deliver the news.
They calmed a nervous public by dismissing concerns about terrorism and urged Texas
residents not to touch the potentially dangerous debris. But, in the early hours after the
disaster, networks also seemed to grope feebly to provide an explanation where one did
not yet exist. And at least one network fell victim to a cruel prank.

University City police Officer Charles Adams was watching CBS when a supposed
eyewitness called the network to claim he had found debris in his back yard, including a
human ear. A stunned Dan Rather was about to respond when the caller called him an
idiot. At that point the caller was cut off.

************

Miami Herald
Sun, Feb. 02, 2003

Glenn Garvin

GETTING PERSONAL

Perhaps it was because many of the people covering the disaster felt
personally wounded. Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, working as an
analyst for NBC, broke into sobs on the air as he read a poem e-mailed
to him by a viewer.

And on CBS, Dan Rather looked positively stricken. Perhaps it was his
Texas roots -- Rather has been covering space launches and recoveries
since they began in the early 1960s -- but his face was always grim
and at times ashen.

After President Bush's mid-afternoon speech, Rather called for ''a
moment of silence,'' and CBS went briefly quiet. Later Rather noted
that the Columbia exploded over Bush's home state of Texas, said that
would certainly strike the president's enemies in Iraq as significant,
then concluded: ``For those in Iraq who choose to think that, we will
say no more.''

Rather also suffered the indignity of an on-air prank phone call,
from someone who supposedly saw debris fall. As Rather attempted to
interview him, the caller shouted, ''You're an idiot!'' Replied Rather
with aplomb: ''I am an idiot . . . That was a crank call.'' Later,
MSNBC anchors were considerably more flustered by a crank call
from a follower of radio idiot Howard Stern.

Much better was CNN's call from Cronkite, for years the voice of CBS
space coverage.

He sounded slower and more gravelly, but still oddly comforting, as
he reflected on the high price of American technohubris. ''We fall
into the mistaken belief that travel in that great void of space can
be routine,'' Cronkite mused. ``Then we get these terrible reminders
of how wrong we are.''

************

BETTER REPORTING WOULD HELP
By Ellen Gray

HOWARD STERN must be so proud.

One of his fans Saturday seized the opportunity presented by live coverage
of the Columbia disaster to once again catch "CBS News" anchor Dan
Rather in a Stern-show-inspired prank.

He even got Rather, who was waxing both literary and loopy on Saturday -
and who apparently got a similar call during the July 1999 coverage of the
death of JFK Jr. - to call himself an "idiot."

I may be giving Stern too much credit, but as one of his fellow baby
boomers, I'd like to think he'd personally have accorded the moment, if
not Rather, more respect.

Like me, Stern grew up at a time when TV coverage of the space program
was focused more on triumph than on tragedy. And as sad a day as
Saturday was, it made me a little nostalgic for NASA's wonder years, when
there was nothing routine in those Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions,
all focused on eventually putting a man on the moon, and when science
geeks got at least as much air time as those who'd spent their college years
perfecting their on-air delivery.

Stern fans notwithstanding, at least this weekend belonged to the science
guys and the space enthusiasts.

There was "CBS News" space consultant, Bill Harwood, who's covered the
comings and goings of the shuttle for at least 15 years, doing the kind of
explanatory journalism that makes us all a little smarter while breaking the
news that NASA's suspicions were focused on the shuttle's left wing.

(It's not Harwood's fault, or even Rather's, that CBS, which was the first of
the Big Three to get its main anchor on the air Saturday morning, was also
the first to ditch coverage, cutting away from a much-delayed NASA news
conference to carry the Bob Hope Chrysler Golf Classic.)

************

TV Guide
2/17/03

Cheers and Jeers

JEERS to spreading sickness. Howard Stern regular "Captain Janks"
(real name: Tom Cipriano) is the moron who prank-called CBS's Dan
Rather, on air, shortly after the February 1 space shuttle tragedy.
Network screeners should have been sharper, and Cipriano is, well,
words fail. But this Jeer goes to Stern, who called Cipriano a "sick
mind" -- but still played the taped call on his show.

************

If only we'd all shut up when we've little to say

February 4, 2003

BY RICHARD ROEPER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

About four hours after the first reports of major problems with the shuttle Columbia on Saturday morning, ABC-TV's Peter Jennings admitted there really wasn't anything new to say.
"This is what we do on television--we sit around and talk about it," said Jennings in a refreshingly candid moment.
So, in the temporary absence of any hard news updates, the ABCs and the CNNs and the MSNBCs rounded up every former astronaut and every retired NASA veteran and every science reporter in the Rolodex--and, when the anchors weren't talking to
the experts, they were taking phone calls from citizens claiming to be eyewitnesses.

Like the one who said he witnessed a commercial jetliner coming perilously close to
Columbia. Really? At an altitude of 207,000 feet?

Then, there was inevitable intrusion from the tirelessly morbid Captain Janks, the sad-sack
veteran prank caller and Howard Stern fan whose hoaxing cameos have plagued anchors
during live reports for years. Posing as a viewer from Eulis, Texas, Janks got through to Dan
Rather and said there was a large piece of debris in his backyard "that looked like one of Baba
Booey's teeth."

Now, if you don't listen to Stern, that joke about the oversized choppers of Stern's longtime
producer means nothing. Still, you'd think Rather would figure something was amiss--but he
plowed ahead, asking Janks where Eulis can be found on the Texas map, even as a producer
could be heard telling Rather it was a prank call.

"You're an idiot!" said Janks, presumably looking at a mirror, before hanging up.

Most incredible of all was Rather's response: "I am an idiot, but that's beside the point." Rather
then offered an "abject apology" to viewers and said, "We move on."

Dan Rather is a lot of things, but he's not an idiot. If only he'd said, "Call me an idiot if you
will, sir, but what would you call a person who reacts to a human tragedy by making a prank
phone call? Who will remember YOU when you leave this world?"

One couldn't help but feel sorry for Rather as he chastised himself, when the real fault lies with
whoever took Janks' call and called him back at his home--which has a Pennsylvania area
code--and yet still believed the guy was an eyewitness in Texas.

 

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