If COVID-19 Is A Conspiracy, Radio Can Show You How They Did It

In 1993, The Tampa Bay Times was about to do a three-page spread on the arrival of night jock, Bubba The Love Sponge in Tampa at 93.3 WFLZ. At the same time, Bubba and ‘FLZ late night talent, Tom Steele were having a nightly on-air feud.

Bubba was such an impactful on-air talent, that I feared the day that, then PD BJ Harris asked me to fill in for Bubba while he took a day off. Bubba had built up so much expectation for his audience, that I knew I would be a disappointment to them if I just came in doing my own thing. But then, I got an idea…

What if Bubba wasn’t on-air that specific night because the feud between him and Tom got so heated in the hallways that they had both gotten suspended? So, I had the office manager record a line that said, “Hi I’m Russell Link, office manager of 93.3 The Power Pig. Due to the on-going feud between Bubba The Love Sponge and Tom Steele, Bubba The Love Sponge has been suspended…” along with some other things.

Before I cracked the mic that night, I let a little dead air come in for effect…and then I hit the Russell Link recording.

Bubba The Love Sponge Suspended

That night’s show became all about listeners wanting to know what happened and saying if Bubba was gone, they’d never listen to us again, and the phones stayed lit the entire night, yet it had nothing to do with anything I did. Or did it?

When the editor of the Tampa Bay Times called, he sounded a tad stressed out of his mind. His three-page weekend spread on Bubba had no back-up plan, and it was already Wednesday, so if Bubba were fired, the newspaper would have to scramble to fill these pages. The editor asked questions about what had happened, and I stuck to the script, reiterating what Russell had already shared in the message.

The next day on the front page of the Tampa Bay Times, a banner read, “Radio Personalities Taken Off The Air.” Russell Link was quoted in the article as was I. Friday’s paper had another headline, “Bubba and Steele back on the air on 93.3 FLZ.”

The archive link to this story still exists. See it here.

That’s a pretty good amount of press for a story that was 75% fabrication.

So, what does this have to do with the COVID-19 conspiracy? Keep reading.

Name Your Dog, Wag!

Years later, I would become a program director at a station in Greenville, SC and as fate would have it, I would hire a guy by the name of Tom Steele, the same guy whose on-air feud allowed me to “Wag The Dog.” As the Tom, in “Hawk N’ Tom” at WFBC, B93.7, Tom and I would have opportunities to see new and similar scenarios play out once again.

When the Greenville Memorial Auditorium was being knocked down in the mid 90’s, without alerting Hawk or Tom, I encouraged three part-timers to paint the name “Hawk N’ Tom” on the auditorium. Part of the agreement was that they couldn’t tell anyone, but if they did it successfully, I’d get them paid handsomely for their efforts. I may have even taken them to Lowe’s to buy the paints and supplies and anything they’d need.

Read the story, Tias Schuster and the Paint Roller by clicking here.

I never told my bosses and I never told Hawk or Tom, but when the three underlings successfully painted that name on the building, listeners began calling into our morning show. Hawk and Tom were shocked, surprised, freaked out and a little frightened; all great emotions to stir this little pot of potential gold.

One of the TV stations covered the story for their noon news, and the story started spreading so fast that the PD of Greenville’s Rock 101 at the time, Ken Carson, called the city of Greenville to see if they’d paint over it. The city couldn’t see spending any money on a building that would be demolished a couple months later and refused, so Ken, being wise, paid for the ‘paint over’ out of his own station’s budget.

Mother Nature and Ken Carson Can’t Be Fooled

And as fast as the brown paint covered the names painted in yellow, the story started to go away. I didn’t have a Russell Link, but I did have a GM named Jim Kirkland, and he recorded a message which talked about the name “Hawk N’ Tom” appearing in yellow paint on the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, and that we were looking at the matter internally, and until there was resolve, “Hawk N’ Tom” would not be on the air. We ran that once every hour and the next morning, the duo wasn’t on the air, and instead, I was.

Unbeknownst to me, the city of Greenville had just launched a task force to minimize and eliminate graffiti in the city, so when the TV stations asked the city for comment, they were quick to say, “there was a full on-going investigation.”

I kept “Hawk N’ Tom” off the air, yet another day, and the TV stations became curious and now, invested and this story began to blow up once again. I fanned the flame with the little bit of information we had, someone painted names on a building, the internal investigation, the city’s investigation and when “Hawk N’ Tom” would or could return.

Just as the story was about to become old news, we had great news from city hall, “Hawk N’ Tom” had been cleared of any wrongdoing. The news on all local channels covered the story and even shared that this incident had caused stress to the duo who would be taking a week off, before returning to work.

The Miss Information Pageant

But what was the source of this information? Me. There was no city hall meeting, just theater of the mind, but the media thirsty for the next bit of information took every word I shared during my fill-in and echoed it as fact, including the part of the boys needing time off. The vacation they took had been on the books for months.

I could give many radio examples like the time the Secret Service showed up because of a dollar bill Tom Steele put in the soda machine, or when he drove the station van blindfolded to honor Ray Charles, who although blind had stated that he had driven a car, or the time the stunt kid stole a golf cart from a local country club, and in all of those cases, you would see exactly how someone could snow you to believe any conspiracy, whether it be aliens, the earth being flat, 9/11 and now COVID-19.

In both scenarios in this column, we see media being sucked into the story, one time for personal reasons as the Tampa Bay Times was invested and on a timeline that controlled their desire for a good outcome. In the other, the media became invested when the city defending something so blatantly missed by a new task force, gave the indication that they were looking into “Hawk N’ Tom” as suspects.

Little morsels of truth--it’s what all conspiracy’s hinge on. If they can make you believe a small piece of the entire story, then they can get you to believe the whole thing, and it’s even better if they can get people on their side who once believed it was all a lie, but now have been fully enlightened.

If COVID-19 is, indeed, a man-made virus, then there’s one man I know who could have mixed this up at his house. His name: Tom Steele.