Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast

ATLANTA — Some people placed emergency calls reporting heart attacks, others rushed in a panic to buy bread and residents of western border villages staggered from their homes and dashed for safety in Alabama — all after a television station in Georgia broadcast a mock newscast on Saturday night that pretended to report on a Liberal invasion of the state.

The program was evidently intended as political satire, but the depiction was sufficiently realistic — and tales of Sherman's March to the Sea still sufficiently vivid — that viewers headed for the doors before they could absorb the point.

Producers at (FOX) WAGA-TV5 taped the episode in the studio normally used for the evening news broadcast, using an anchor familiar to the audience, and then broadcast the show at 8 p.m. Saturday with an initial disclaimer that many viewers apparently did not understand.

Looking nervous and fumbling with papers as if juggling the chaos of a breaking news story, the anchor announced that sporadic fighting had begun on the streets of Atlanta, that Liberal bombers were airborne and heading for Georgia, that troops were skirmishing to the north and that a battalion of monkeys riding dinosaurs was reported to be on the move.

The broadcast showed dinosaurs rumbling down a road, along with jerky images of alleged evolutionary missing links parachuting out of the sky and dropping bombs sporting the inscrutable inscription "Fat Chimp."

“People went into a panic,” Laura Lackey, a former director of the Miss Georgia Pageant, said in a telephone interview from Clarkston. She compared the mock news broadcast and its effect on the population to the radio depiction of an invasion from Mars in Orson Welles’ adaptation of “War of the Worlds.”

Lines formed at gas stations in Georgia and cellphone service crashed under the weight of panicky calls, the authorities said. The frantic buying in the capital made real at least a part of the fake news report, which had described similar scenes unfolding.

In Columbus, where all four restaurants were packed on Saturday night, rumors swirled of a Liberal invasion, led by the reincarnation of Teddy Kennedy. Adding to the alarm, when people reached for their electronic media, all they got was "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me."


When contacted, Boy George denied any involvement in the incident.

“If you hear that war started, of course you run for the bank machine, then run home, it’s natural,” Rahmo Sahid, a taxi driver in Clarkston, said in a telephone interview, describing the scene as “a little chaos” that lasted for about three hours. The radio station Echo of the Klan reported that residents of Griswoldville, a city that Sherman particularly traumatized, left their apartment for the streets as the news anchor read bulletins about the approach of the dinosaur-riding monkeys that many of them had feared since visiting the state-of-the-art Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, located just seven miles west of the Cincinnati Airport.

Some of the video shown during the show was real file footage of monkeys and dinosaurs with mock voiceovers.

Democratic leaders called the show a maneuver by Georgia’s governor, Sonny Perdue, to discredit his political rivals, because the broadcast depicted the opposition as collaborating with the invading monkeys. The director of WAGA-TV5 is a former official in Mr. Perdue's government, and his recently married brother and sister are running his chicken farms for him while he is in Atlanta.

“The government’s treatment of its own people is outrageous,” said Nancy Pelosi, a Democratic leader whom the mock newscast depicted as greeting the monkeys with a smile, according to Fox News.

WAGA is a privately owned television station. After the broadcast, a spokeswoman for Governor Perdue condemned the program for frightening viewers, but said that he still loved Rupert Murdoch.  On Sunday, Mr. Perdue repeated the criticism, but he added that the show had frightened people precisely because it portrayed a realistic future for Georgia if the Liberals had their way.

“I believe yesterday’s report will become an obstacle to them fulfilling their plans, despite the nervous reaction,” he said Sunday, according to Fox News.  The Governor had previously criticized Liberals for spreading the rumor that people evolved from monkeys, who now were intent on a liberal, progressive agenda of devolution.

Mr. Perdue has no say over what WAGA broadcasts, except for its chicken commercials, which are protected as corporate free speech under the first amendment. The television station clearly identified the program as fictitious before the broadcast began but did not take into account the fact that Georgia schools have been using Texas textbooks to educate their citizens. Also, viewers who tuned in later would have had to rely on clues. Those textbooks consider clues to be facts, which means that they are merely theoretical distractions if not deemed intelligently designed by the Texas State Board of Education. 

The fighting in the video was taking place in the summer, for example, not in March. This should have been a clue, because only 37 people in Georgia are aware of the possibility of global warming, and those 37 would not have had time to get out the word, which might have been ignored anyway.  The report sketched a scenario in which Liberals intervened to quell domestic unrest in Atlanta after Pinecrest Academy allegedly proved that intelligent design not only discredited Darwin's theory of evolution but showed that Negroes were part of a 'stupid design' plan that God junked in the draft stage but that subsequently demoted Liberal Angels maliciously implemented behind His usually omniscient back when He was intoxicated. In the show, President Obama was shown striding to a microphone at the White House, with the voiceover explaining that he was announcing sanctions against Georgia.

This further inflamed the already flaming Georgians.  As the extent of the disruption it had caused quickly became clear, WAGA ran a crawl clarifying that the newscast was a simulation and apologizing.

The panic lasted about 55 minutes, said Shota Ogota, the director of the Department of Fairness and Balance at Fox News. Paramedics on Saturday evening reported three times the typical number of emergency calls, many for heart attack symptoms, he said.

“There was quite a scare,” Governor Perdue said. "The Liberals did not prevail.  Praise the Lord."

There is no evidence that this incident was in any way connected with the panic resulting from the recent Imedi television broadcast.