Turner Perpetrates Hoax, Then Covers It As Boston Security Crisis

Posted 5:13 p.m., January 31, 2007

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Update

Posted 8:40 p.m., January 31, 2007

It emerges that the devices in question were "light boards" that were displayed as small billboard-style devices in a number of U.S. cities for two to three weeks in the cities of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco and Philadelphia. This doesn't diminish Turner Broadcasting's responsibility, but it does beg the question why authorities responded the way they did today. Those would have been some mighty weird bombs, as the photo in this story would attest. Also, allegedly there has been an arrest in this case, which the BBC World News reports was the country's biggest security alert since the 9/11 attacks.

...

It was a beautiful little example of "synergy" that we saw at work today on one of our cable news channels.

If you're a stay-at-home worker like me, or if your workplace has a TV monitor somewhere in the building, chances are you saw the dramatic coverage all day long of the big scare in Boston. All the news networks covered it, but CNN was particularly breathless about it, staying live with a chopper cam image for what seemed to be hours on end.

I tried to take on the CNN anchors' concerns as best as I could—-for clearly they were alarmed, acting almost as if this were an episode of "24" unfolding in real time and real space—but it was a little hard to get too worked up.

It just felt like I'd seen this movie before. True, Boston officials were acting with due caution, closing down two major bridges and the Charles River while investigating the placement of of these devices all over town. I'm sure traffic was brought to a near standstill.

But, I felt relatively secure that this was a prank after I Iearned that the eight or so devices all appeared to be somehow linked, but that the first of them was destroyed after it was determined not to have been an explosive. But you never know. So I kept one semi-curious eye on the screen, monitoring the helicopter video feed while going about my business.

I had totally dismissed the thing as a hoax as soon as I found out that the destroyed device bore a "circuit board" dispay with lights arranged in such a way that they lit up to form a smiley face and an outstretched middle finger. (The actual image was revealed to be "harmless magnetic lights" arranged similarly to the one shown in the accompanying photo, left.)

I just don't see Osama or his buddies having quite that well-developed a sense of humor.

By that point I was amusing myself trying to guess how Jon Stewart is going to lampoon this bit of tomfoolery on tonight's "Daily Show." Stewart loves buggering the media when it goes all silly over these over-obsessive live news events that amount to nothing.

Chalk it up to just another stupid non-event event that got over-hyped by the broadcast media. Right?

Not so fast.

CNN's Headline News, about an hour ago, revealed that the hoax had been perpetrated by its own parent company, Turner Broadcasting. This turns out to be part of an ad campaign for one of the network's cartoon shows! (Turner is blaming a third-party ad agency, as though they have no idea what ads are going out to pimp their on-air products.)

So. Let's review. CNN full-court-pressed this crap all afternoon as a major news story—the network even brought in its Homeland Security correspondent to comment on the piece, giving it dark overtones indeed. Meanwhile, anchor Kyra Phillips repeatedly stressed that the device had been made "inoperable" and "rendered safe" by authorities, as though there was anything to "render."

So the same media company that used its news division to play this thing up to hilt, trying to scare people out of their wits and drive up the ratings, is the company that perpetrated the hoax. How nice.

It should be noted that Headline News did its job and put this information out as soon as it had it. According to its report, Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network staged the hoax as a way of pimping "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," one of its more bizarre Adult Swim cartoon features.

Did Kyra Phillips know this? Did Jeanne Meserve? I would gather they did not. Meserve, the Homeland Security correspondent and an old pro, did the best she could with what I think she clearly felt was a non-story. Phillips can be faulted, at a minimum, for bringing not one apparent shred of skepticism to the spectacle she was voicing over, though skepticism was clearly called for.

But forget about them. Did nobody in the upper floors at Turner Broadcasting know anything about this? No executives knew what was unfolding and the potential hazards they were creating in Boston? There was no one at the Cartoon Network that might have stepped forward to inform authorities what was going on before this thing went on for four or five hours, crippling a major American city's traffic and river system, possibly putting bomb squad personnel and who knows who at risk?

Are we, likewise, to gather that absolutely no one in the Turner Broadcast family was not sitting back in their big comfy leather chair in their big patrician corner office laughing their balls off because they had again harnessed the inherent synergy between their news network and their entertainment division through this, ahem, "comic ruse"?

As a journalist who gets confronted with mistrust I have not earned on a not infrequent basis because of this kind of broadcast news bull... —shall we say "ca-ca"— I must say, I resent that hell out of it. And boy, oh boy, would I ever like to see it stopped.

But this is a bean-counter's world, it's never going to stop. The news outlets are just little players in huge conglomerates now, and news is merely another commodity in a long line of a mega-corp's products, and not a terribly profitable one. You've got to get some use out of it. From Turner's perspective, this might be seen as just a little product-placement attempt that went a bit awry. No big deal, a bit of bad P.R., you live and learn. Next time, things won't be so messy.

Maybe Boston will sue for its expense and inconvenience, but it won't matter. Turner wins, even as their journalists lose. There is no such thing as bad press, they say. And promo like this is simply priceless. If Jeanne Meserve resigns in disgust, well, that's just the price of doing business.

-- Kevin Featherly

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