Kramer & Twitch, the Dallas deejays responsible for the Britney Spears-is-dead hoax that tore through the Internet last week, have been deep-sixed.
Clear Channel Communications, the parent company of Dallas' KEGL-FM, confirmed that the shock duo was fired Monday for their unfunny joke.
Last Tuesday, on their Extreme Night Time Radio show, Kramer & Twitch perpetrated the story that Spears died in a Los Angeles auto accident and her boy-band boyfriend, 'N Syncer Justin Timberlake, was left in a coma.
The phony report quickly circulated online as concerned Dallas fans, seeking more information, hit the Internet message boards. Soon, the Los Angeles police and fire department were inundated with calls from grieving fans and sleuthing news reporters vainly trying to confirm the bogus tragedy.
For their part, Kramer & Twitch, aka Keith Kramer and Tony Longo, told the Dallas Morning News that while they did engineer the hoax, and cleared it with the program director, they never meant to cause a panic. They said their original plan, to announce the demise of Metallica's James Hetfield, would be too cruel a prank to play on the station's rock-based audience. Instead, the two figured Spears and Timberlake were easy pickings, with few fans among the station's listeners.
They figured wrong.
Numerous Britney fan sites and newsgroups took the report and ran in something akin to an Internet game of telephone. Varying accounts of the "accident" sprang up, from rumors of a 100-plus mph drunken-driving spree to phony news clippings from the BBC and Associated Press.
After the singers' publicists refuted the rumors, fans aimed their vitriol toward the deejays, with KEGL logging more than 200 calls and faxes blasting the hosts. There was also the threat of litigation by the popsters. "Representatives for both Spears and Timberlake are looking into the situation to determine the original source of the rumor and if legal action is appropriate," a Jive Records spokesperson said last week. (The singers' reps didn't comment on the firing.)
Apparently, the station, which had disciplined the two over their raunchy show before, had enough. "Because it was a whole series of things that accumulated over time, that led us to believe Kramer & Twitch would probably be better off elsewhere and we would be better off making a fresh start and doing something new," Clear Channel Communications v.p. Tom Schurr told the Morning News.
The radio team began their stint at KEGL ("The Eagle") in mid-1998 and developed a significant following, even making the Dallas Observer's "Best Reason to Listen to KEGL" in 1999. The two still have photos on the station's Website, www.kegl.com, depicting them fondling and being fondled by several female strippers.