

Yet Do No Harm applies not just to health care providers but to radio personalities, their producers and everyone else. The Do No Harm principle is a bedrock of ethics courses every would-be medical, nursing, dental and pharmacy student must take to graduate. But at the very least, we can expect that they won’t make us worse. We associate this principle with health care professionals, and rightly so: We’d like our physicians to make us better. The ethical principle at the heart of this policy is simple: Do No Harm. Mercer model of prank calls: Let the person in on the joke before things spiral out of control. But this sad story should be a wake-up call for radio hosts around the world to follow the Roy D. Perhaps she was so troubled that the slightest upset would have brought about her tragic choice. Whether this would have prevented Saldhana’s suicide is hard to say. Rather, they erred in not letting the person who took the call know that the whole thing was a joke. The Australian DJs’ mistake was not the making of the call, which done artfully might indeed have been funny. Weinstein’s interview with Douglas and Stone Whatever the supposed injustice that Mercer encountered, the result was always the same: a request for an outrageous sum of money to right the wrong, followed by the threat of violence, and ending with the recipient of the call being informed that the whole thing was a ruse set up by a friend. From the moment I heard the first track, I was hooked, and I ended up playing every album more times than I can count – as my beleaguered wife will attest.įor samples of Mercer calls, click on menu’s “speed dial”

The Mercer character has developed a huge following across the country through CDs sold at truck stops, but I’d never heard of him until a music subscription service recommended him after I listened to an album by Larry the Cable Guy. Everyone has a good laugh, and no one was worse for wear. Mercer’s outrageous demands for retribution quickly led to threats of an “a**-whuppin’,” but just as the person on the receiving end was about to blow his stack, Douglas and co-host Phil Stone let the patsy in on the joke. Sign up for CNN Opinion’s new newsletter.yago:WikicatFictionalCharactersIntroducedIn1993.yago:WikicatFictionalCharactersFromOklahoma.dbc:Fictional_characters_from_Tulsa,_Oklahoma.dbc:Radio_characters_introduced_in_1993.

The character was retired in 2012 upon Stone's death. Mercer name via Virgin Records and Capitol Records. The two released twelve albums of prank call recordings under the Roy D. Douglas, who performed Mercer's voice, used the character as a vehicle for comedy sketches in which he performed prank calls. Mercer was a fictional character created by American disc jockeys Brent Douglas and Phil Stone on radio station KMOD-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
