Yesterday, B&T – like a number of other news sites – picked up on a story about CNN in the US accidentally running 30 minutes of porn when viewers had tuned into the latest instalment of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. We didn’t run it in our daily newsletter as stuff like that gets picked up in your SPAM filters.
Well, it would appear the story was faked after a prankster in the US posted the allegation on their Twitter account.
The UK’s The Independent quickly picked-up the fabricated yarn up and then, due to its obvious novelty value, it soon spread like wildfire across a number of news websites including The New York Post, Mashable, The Daily Mail, Esquire and Variety.
CNN initially blamed a local station in Boston, RCN, for the mishap and even issued a statement that said: “The RCN cable operator in Boston aired inappropriate content for 30 minutes on CNN last night. CNN has asked for an explanation.”
However, RCN said the porn incident never happened and RCN’s general manger, Jeff Carlson, soon snapped back with: “We are in the process of researching this incident but see no evidence our CNN network feed was compromised last evening in Boston.”
The whole incident is an excellent example of how newsrooms trust social media as fact and too often use it as the bases to stories. B&T would like to apologise to any readers who may have been offended.
