Remember the scene in Good Morning Vietnam when Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) and his team edited a speech from Richard Nixon into a comical interview? Life may have imitated art in the 2016 presidential race, as a radio morning show host with a legendary resume in Atlanta is in hot water after he spliced old interview clips of Donald Trump together and packaged the clips as a new interview with the presidential candidate.
Steve McCoy, currently the morning show co-host at NewsRadio 106.7, claimed that he conducted a phone interview with Trump and broadcast it on air. McCoy, who has been a fixture in Atlanta radio for over thirty years, initially claimed that Trump’s campaign staff had advised him to avoid policy questions and insisted on editorial control.
Rodney Ho, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution radio and TV columnist, has noted that spliced interviews are nothing new in McCoy’s career:
A former Star 94 employee who declined to be identified since he is still in the business told me that at Star, repackaging or recycling old celebrity interviews to sound like they were fresh was perfectly acceptable during the time he worked there.
Ho also noted that he may have recognized the original interview with Trump:
Based on the subject matter that aired, this Trump interview may date back nine years when he was promoting a “Trump University” seminar in early 2006. (I went through my clip files and found I had talked to Trump in February of that year.) McCoy was with Star 94 at the time. He apparently saves a lot of his old interviews.
NewsRadio 106.7 program director Greg Tantum stated that he would investigate the matter. McCoy did not appear on the air on Thursday, and Ho reported that a station manager told him that McCoy had been suspended until the station could determine what actually took place.
BuzzFeed posted an audio recording and transcript of the interview as it aired on Tuesday’s show.
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