KROQ Deejays Will Keep Their Jobs : Radio: Station officials blame the murder hoax on ratings competition; Kevin Ryder and Gene Baxter will return next week.

For the first time since an on-air murder confession was revealed to be a hoax, KROQ-FM officials commented publicly on the incident Thursday, blaming it on the intense competition for ratings and insisting that the disc jockeys involved will not be fired.

Morning personalities Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter admitted publicly last Friday to concocting the phony confession along with fellow KROQ deejay Doug Roberts. All three had been suspended without pay the previous afternoon, following publication that morning of a story in The Times about the hoax.

KROQ (106.7) General Manager Trip Reeb defended the deejays in an interview Thursday.

“I think this was (due to) the pressures of being in Los Angeles and trying to get ratings,” Reeb said.

Ryder, Baxter and Roberts will be back on the air sometime next week, he said.

“They have been great employees,” Reeb said. “They made a mistake. We are not the kind of company that gives up on its people that easily. We feel that they have been exemplary and that they deserve a certain amount of loyalty on our part as well.”

The purported murder confession that was broadcast last June drew widespread media attention and resulted in a 10-month criminal investigation overseen by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. A segment about it aired twice on the NBC series “Unsolved Mysteries,” generating about 400 calls linking it to other crimes around the country.

KROQ broadcast a taped apology by Ryder and Baxter last Friday in which they admitted making “very serious mistakes” and said that their publicity stunt had snowballed on them.

Reeb said that Ryder and Baxter told him recently--after acknowledging the hoax--that they had felt compelled to maintain the hoax once the media attention started.

“They said they’d go in the bathroom every time the papers would call and say, ‘Jesus, what are we doing?’ ” Reeb said. “Once it got on national TV, they felt kind of committed.”

Reeb said that he had not yet decided which day the deejays would go back on the air, but that it definitely would be next week.

“We feel like a little over a week off the air is a significant time for being suspended, but we’re going to wait a little bit to make that decision,” he said.

Reeb said that he did not know about the hoax until Sheriff’s Sgt. John Yarbrough approached him two weeks ago with the information.

Steven A. Lerman, an attorney for Infinity Broadcasting Corp., which owns KROQ, maintained that the company has acted conscientiously since the hoax was revealed.

“The company has done everything that it could reasonably be expected to do,” Lerman said. “We cooperated with the police. We conducted our own inquiry. We got the facts ascertained. We disclosed them to the police. We disciplined the individuals. We sent around a company-wide policy statement that deals with the broadcast of false information. It has always been prohibited; we re-affirmed this policy. They’ve apologized on the air. Trip Reeb apologized. I don’t see what else we could have done other than fire them. But that’s a matter of licensee discretion. The guys did apologize. They obviously got snowballed by events. They did not use good judgment, no question about that, but they’ve admitted it.”

In a letter Lerman wrote to the sheriff’s department, Infinity offered to make restitution by contributing to a community service organization chosen by the department.

“What we had in mind was a free concert for underprivileged children or something like that,” Lerman said. “Something where the station could use its resources to devote to some community-related activity that the police thought was important. It was intended as a goodwill gesture. We wanted to do something that showed we were good citizens in the community.”

The Sheriff’s Department refused that offer and instead plans to present a bill to the station for the number of hours that homicide investigator Yarbrough spent on the case--by his count, 149. The department was still tabulating that figure Thursday.