Basically like the title says, I guess.
About 3 pm. (Sunday)
Did a Port Angeles NPR annoucer say "aw shit" on air, followed by an eternity of dead air yesterday?
Dunno…but it does happen.
KNX News Radio (AM 1070, a CBS affiliate) in Los Angeles once cut to one of their remotes, and the reporter wasn’t cued properly, so we got about two seconds of cussing. The anchor said something along the lines of, “Yes, I heard it too,” and then went right on to the next segment.
Well, I didn’t hear it, and I listen to KPLU and NWPR. 
When i was young, I worked part time at the local FM station, and I was there when one of the on-air talent said “Damn it, God Damn it” clearly and very LOUDLY on air as he started a song. Oddly enough I remember the song, it was *“Sad Eyes” *by Robert John. No idea why I recall that detail.
So why did he say those words so loudly and clearly while his mic was still hot? As he cued the song up, he leaned back and crossed his legs. Somewhere under the mixing board his bare leg (he always wore shorts) had found a bare wire.:D:D
Port Angeles? Washington? NPR? Why do the Schweddy balls ladies come to mind?
Booger.
Didn’t hear it myself, may be an urban legend, but it was told to me by someone who worked as a producer at the station and claimed to have heard it. CBC Radio, Toronto, summer afternoon show, a wine expert was fielding calls: what would you recommend for a BBQ burger, that sort of thing. The show was on a 5-second delay, but it was a lazy summer day and the technician wasn’t paying a lot of attention. A male caller says, “my girl friend and I are lounging by the pool and were wondering what wine you’d suggest for eating pussy?” Technician springs to life, but too late! The wine expert saved the day: “I always like to recommend a nice, light Chablis. Next caller?” leaving everyone to wonder “did I hear what I thought I heard?”
I wasn’t even aware Port Angeles had its own NPR, since I was there last month and the local NPR was just a transmitter of KPLU Tacoma. And since I’ve heard nothing about KPLU inadvertantly swearing, I doubt it happened.
I learned, both OTA and in person, from a very experienced radio personality that if there’s a screwup, you do everything possible to just pick up on the beat and keep going. Half the listeners will never notice, and a large percentage of the rest will wonder exactly the same thing. Since few people record radio, it’s forgotten except in much later flappage and more quickly forgotten in the long run.
It’s the cases where the voice or the guest or the sidekick makes some big deal out of it, or even stops to apologize, that it gets out of control.
A couple of months ago, it was Bring your Daughters and Sons to Work Day at an NPR studio in California. The kids were supposed to sit quietly in the control room but one of them hit a button that caused about a minute of dead air during one of the NPR programs on some stations.
Ah, ok - I probably stand corrected here - most likely the Tacoma NPR, then.
The only other on-air snafu I can recall is the famous Dave Hodge pencil flip, many decades ago, during CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, signalling his frustration over a CBC programming decision.
The flip got him fired.
It has been known, even among the most distinguished broadcasters.
During the Coronation festivities of 1937, the BBC employed an ex-Navy officer to describe the Navy’s sailpast of ships, flagged and decorated for the occasion. Unfortunately, he spent too much time visiting old colleagues during the day, and by the time of the broadcast told the listeners on several occasions that the fleet was all lit up - enough for it to become evident that so was he.
Richard Dimbleby, who’d covered just about everything for BBC, including WW2 bombing raids and the discovery of Belsen, was completely wrongfooted by assorted incompetencies and technical glitches during a live TV relay of a royal state visit in the 1960s, and was heard to say “Jesus wept” at a crucial moment.
And then there was the interview not so long ago on the BBC’s flagship breakfast radio news programme with Jeremy Hunt, who was then the Secretary of State for Culture, with an unfortunate Spoonerism to introduce him - the announcer’s name, incidentally, was James Naughtie.
On a side note, the Who’s “Who Are You” has always, to my recollection, been played with the F bomb intact. 
I had just started 10th grade when it came out (and Keith Moon died shortly afterwards) and we would gather around the radio whenever it came on and giggle like little kids when we heard it.
Did anyone here ever listen to Bob Larson’s infamous call-in show during its late 80s/early 90s heyday? Even though it was on a delay, stuff slipped through all the time - and that show aired primarily on Christian stations. Those goofy callers were the main reason I, and a lot of other people, listened to it in the first place. I had totally forgotten about him until a couple years ago, when a certain viral hemorrhagic fever started striking Americans, and I kept thinking that the first one, Dr. Kent Brantly, looked familiar - and then I realized he looked a lot like Mr. Larson. :eek:
Several days ago, NBC was broadcasting live from a Trump rally, and a protester was holding a sign that said “FUCK TRUMP” in what must have been 3-foot-high letters. The cameraperson seemed to linger on that spot. 
p.s. The beginning of the end for Bob’s program was this book, ironically titled “Dead Air”.
Among other things, he left his wife of more than 20 years for the woman who actually wrote this book, which was quite awful (thank God I got it from the library!).
San Diego used to have a radio talk show host, Stacy Taylor, who did a daytime call-in show.
One guy got him a good one. The guy droned on in the usual radio-caller style. “Okay, regarding President Clinton, I have two questions, and so, the first is, I fucked your wife.”
Then, God bless the sot, if he didn’t call back a few weeks later and do it again! “The thing about the Clintons, speaking as a moderate, I guess you’d call me, Hillary is a lesbian.”
Taylor was torn between outrage and admiration.
Nah, gotta give it the inflection Johnny Fever did: “Booogerrrrr”.
Oh, you can say “booger” on the air now, but you can’t say
jive-ass
Does anyone else remember people calling talk shows in the 1990s and starting off with a serious discussion, and then they would yell “HOWARD STERN!” and immediately get cut off? :rolleyes: It didn’t matter what talk show it was or what it was about; anyone was fair game.
You Tube has quite a few videos of people calling C-SPAN and doing this, or something else, most commonly (might want to have some brain bleach handy before clicking on the spoiler):
asking about the size of Mitt Romney’s penis
:eek:
I remember an “eyewitness” calling into one of the networks live to tell them what they could see during the then happening OJ car chase only to wind up yelling BABABOOEY after a few sentences of “I SEE OJ, MAN!” nonsense.
There was, in around 1948, a very prim and proper presenter of programmes for children, who in all seriousness produced this gem, which the BBC went ahead and broadcast. For years it was a sort of underground joke, certainly in my family, with loads of people denying the very possibility, but bootleg recordings of it started to emerge until finally the Beeb admitted it during one of their anniversary reviews of the organisation’s history: