The internet went crazy this morning after a report surfaced that Boston’s CNN channel aired 30 minutes of hardcore porn. Media took off with it, but I have to admit that the details appeared sketchy because how does a major cable provider like RCN unknowingly air 30 seconds let alone 30 MINUTES of hardcore porn? Looks like they didn’t:
“We are in the process of researching this incident but see no evidence our CNN network feed was compromised last evening in Boston,” Jeff Carlson, svp and general manager, RCN Boston, said in a statement to THR.
The account @solikearose has protected her tweets, but she shared pictures of her TV to BuzzFeed News to prove that she did not fake this story. Turns out a glitch may have caused it.
“I can tell you that it’s real,” she said.She also shared screenshots of her conversation with an RCN customer support agent, in which she was instructed to reset her TiVo box. Rose said her CNN channel had stopped working and that the instructions restored her service, without the porn this time.She has since turned her Twitter account private after receiving “a lot of hateful stuff” from people who accused her of perpetrating a hoax.“People [accused] me of faking the story and creepy men sending me dick pics and sexual messages,” she said.
I’m not the only who had suspicions. J.D. Durkin at Mediaite decided to investigate further and found massive inconsistencies in the story. For instance, only one Twitter account pointed it out on social media. Sure, others could have reported it via phone of the website of the cable provider. But come on. CNN airing porn for any amount of time, especially 30 minutes, would overload Twitter.
Durkin captured this screenshot:
RCN replied to Rose’s tweets this morning. Durkin published this screenshot:
So no one else reported the fact that the channel aired hardcore porn. Hhhmmm….unless Boston houses a bunch of porn addicts I find this odd. Durkin looked through Twitter:
Based on extensive searches through Tweetdeck for varying terms, it would appear as if only @solikearose Tweeted about the ordeal, something that seems incredibly unlikely for an 11 p.m. Thanksgiving Night snafu of disastrously epic proportions on CNN. Otherwise I’m relatively sure we would have seen a ton of “Blitzer? I hardly know her!” Tweets as it was happening.
This is one of the original reports about the incident:
Boston viewers who tuned into CNN on Thursday night at 10pm EST (4am GMT) were expecting to catch an episode of the popular travel and food show Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, but much to their surprise, they were subjected to 30 minutes of R-rated pornography broadcasting live on the CNN channel instead.However, this was not something that the CNN news broadcaster was responsible for – the channel was being maintained and provided in the region by RCN, a major cable TV provider based in New Jersey that offers hundreds of TV channels relating to movies, sports news and children’s programming, as well as premium on-demand channels and streaming TV on TiVo.
Porn site Brazzers tweeted about the incident, saying that the “porn was probably the least offensive thing CNN has done all year.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY
