6 Times The News Went Totally Overboard Chasing A Story

Of course, invading countries costs money ... and that's where CBS came in.

Realizing that one bloody war in the Caribbean would give them higher ratings than zero bloody wars in the Caribbean, CBS producers agreed to supply funding for the invasion in exchange for exclusive broadcast rights. In return for investing up to $200,000, CBS got to film guns being smuggled through Florida and a training exercise which ended suddenly when a rifle exploded and took a mercenary's eye out. They also recorded a sit-down with Masferrer, who insisted on wearing pantyhose on his head like a financially challenged Batman villain.

CBS eventually pulled out of the deal after delays to the invasion made them suspect they were getting ripped off. (Nobody pays just to see guns smuggled through Florida, a thing hundreds of elderly citizens do by accident every day.) The key plotters were later arrested and CBS was censured by Congress. In a final twist, the mercenary whose rifle exploded sued the network, claiming that he was employed by CBS when he suffered the injuries and was therefore entitled to workers' compensation. The mercenary got $15,000 in an out-of-court settlement, which ruined his chances of CBS pushing him for any Emmys.

In a rather awkward turn of events, it turned out that CBS News had a contract with a rival group of tunnelers, meaning that there was a bit of an underground turf war going on for a while there. The U.S. government discovered the CBS tunnel and ordered them to stop to avoid inflaming tensions in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But by the time they found out about the NBC tunnel, the network was practically editing the documentary already. In the end, all that effort was worth it, for NBC had accomplished something truly transcendental: beating I Love Lucy in the ratings.

Hearst heard about Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, a woman who had tied a notorious local governor to a chair while foiling an alleged rape and was subsequently arrested for kidnapping. Cosio was a beautiful young woman cruelly thrown into prison for supposedly defending herself, and Hearst wanted her on the front page at any cost, even he had to break her out of prison.

So he did that.

It started normally enough, with Hearst's New York Journal running articles declaring the case a travesty of justice and fudging the details to make Cosio into the most unjustly persecuted heroine since Joan of Arc was catapulted into that volcano. About 15,000 readers signed a petition calling for her immediate release, with Hearst personally requesting the signatures of prominent women like President McKinley's mother and ... uh, Jefferson Davis' widow? Really? The 1890s were a bleak time for prominent women, but surely Hearst could have done a little better than someone's mom and the Slave Queen of Old Virginia.

Anyway, despite Hearst's efforts, Spain insisted that Cosio should be put on trial. This was a disaster for Hearst, who risked losing readers if his big campaign just kind of petered out. And so, in the second most unreasonable journalistic request ever after "get me pictures of Spider-Man," Hearst ordered a reporter to break Cosio out of prison.

After deciding against dynamiting a fucking hole in the wall, Journal reporter Karl Decker crawled across a rickety ladder onto the roof of the jail and used a wrench to break through the bars on the window. Cosio crawled out through the window and was hustled onto a boat while disguised as a cigar-toting man. The boat set sail after customs officers were distracted with a timely round of free drinks. (How is "Don't take free drinks from the strange guy in the fake beard" not lesson one of being a customs officer?) Cosio arrived in New York to a crowd of 75,000, and the paper sold so many copies that people are probably still wrapping fish with them.

Peavey roared with laughter, told the reporters to get fucked, and legged it out of there. Puzzled that their brilliant plan had failed to work, the reporters involved later thought they had identified the problem: They got the murdered guy's accent wrong. It seems to have never crossed their minds that Peavey, an unashamedly homosexual black man living openly in the freaking 1920s, was probably far too tough to be scared by some asshole wearing a blanket.

Jim Murray, later to become a legendary sportswriter, remembered watching in horror as one-eyed city editor Jim Richardson forced the reporter involved to make the call, which suggests that even the kidnap-happy iguanas at The Examiner realized they might be going too far this time. Still, they clearly didn't feel that bad, since they later offered to pay for Phoebe Short to travel to Los Angeles to identity the body ... and tried to keep her away from the cops and other reporters to protect their exclusive source of information. It almost makes you appreciate present-day journalists for merely pulling whole stories out of their butts. At least there's no grieving moms then.

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Faking ghosts isn't cool--unless it's a dope five foot black light ghost that will freak someone out if you put it in the kitchen at night.

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