6 Times The News Went Totally Overboard Chasing A Story

6

An Australian TV Crew Found A Lost Hiker, Delayed Getting Him Treatment So They Could Film An Interview

In 1999, American tourist Robert Bogucki decided to trek across Australia's Great Sandy Desert in search of spiritual enlightenment, which is a bit harder to find in, like, a nice suite at the Marriott. Since the Great Sandy Desert is exactly what it sounds like, Australian police subsequently got the chance to seek some spiritual enlightenment of their own while mounting a massive search-and-rescue operation for Bogucki's lost ass.

The search effort became a media sensation in Australia -- and that may have saved Bogucki's life. After 43 hellish days, long after the authorities had given up and assumed he was eaten by scorpions or something, Bogucki was spotted by a helicopter carrying a Channel 9 camera crew to the search camp. The crew landed near the starving, sunburned hiker ... and immediately started rolling.

Instead of contacting the police and rushing Bogucki to a hospital, Channel 9 kept him in the desert to film an interview and some footage of him stumbling around and drinking muddy water. Leaked footage of the interview shows that it went on for at least 17 and a half minutes before he got a drink of clean water (shit, we get dry lips just saying a full sentence). Unsurprisingly, Bogucki wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, but the crew insisted on dicking around in the desert for a while.

When they did go, they ignored a medical camp five minutes away and flew an hour to the town of Broome, where Channel 9's reporter and transmitting equipment happened to be located. The network defended themselves by saying it was Bogucki's idea, apparently forgetting that they had recorded the whole thing. Judge for yourself:

The cameraman can clearly be heard interrupting the pilot when he says they can fly to the nearby base, saying, "straight back to Broome would be good." On the way there, they finally offered Bogucki a banana ... which his unprepared body promptly rejected, causing him to vomit. Naturally, the crew touched down again, hustled him out of the helicopter, and filmed him retching and writhing on the ground. This footage was used in their report as the moment they supposedly found him. At this point, we're honestly surprised that they didn't have him sign a reality TV contract and fly him straight to the set of Australian Big Brother.

5

CBS Tried To Fund An Invasion Of Haiti

In 1966, CBS News stumbled upon a secret plan to overthrow the government of Haiti, as one does. The invasion was being planned by a group of Haitian and Cuban exiles led by Rolando "El Tigre" Masferrer, a man with the mind of a skink and the sexual charisma of two much uglier skinks. Masferrer had led an anti-Castro paramilitary group during the Cuban Revolution before fleeing to Miami, where he cooked up his master plan with ex-OSS mercenary Mitchell "The Wizard of Whispering Death" WerBell. (Yes, every single person involved in this had a Metal Gear Solid-like nickname.) Since U.S. support for an invasion of Cuba had dried up after that whole Bay of Pigs shitshow, they needed a new base. So they decided they'd invade Haiti, overthrow bloodsoaked voodoo tyrant Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and use the country as the launching point for a subsequent invasion of Cuba.

4

NBC And CBS Built Rival Tunnels Under The Berlin Wall

After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, there was a boom in news stories about desperate East Berliners making daring journeys to the West (like the guy who drove a freaking train through it). At the time, CBS was the big name in news, while NBC had only recently stopped making Lorne Greene shout the headlines from horseback while filming Bonanza. NBC was keen to beat their rivals by getting real footage of a badass escape. None of that "dramatic recreation" crap.

The problem was that people planning to defect across patrolled borders rarely tell the media how they're gonna do it beforehand. So NBC came up with a creative solution: building their damn own tunnel under the Wall and filming people using it.

Okay, technically some German engineering students built the tunnel (reporters being better at digging up metaphorical dirt). NBC simply agreed to fund the whole thing in exchange for the right to film any resulting escapes. The project cost about $150,000 in today's money and was a massive undertaking, with over 40 tunnelers working in shifts for six months. They had to install pumps to keep the workers from running out of oxygen, while the intended breakthrough point had to be changed at the last minute due to suspicions that some of the diggers were East German spies. These probably weren't problems NBC had learned to deal with on the set of I Dream Of Jeannie.

The tunnel opened in September 1962, whereupon NBC cameramen filmed 21 adults and five babies traveling Bugs-Bunny-style to the West.

NBC The show's working title was Germany's Got Tunnel.

3

The Real-Life Citizen Kane Staged A Real-Life Prison Break

In 1897, maniacal newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst was locked in a bitter circulation war with crazed media magnate Joseph Pulitzer. Both men had been relentlessly covering Spain's cruel occupation of Cuba, so Hearst wanted something to give his cheap sensationalism a little more pizzazz. And then he found it: boobs.

C. S. Forbes & C. R. Cummings This photo was NSFW in 1896.

2

1920s Journalists Kidnapped A Murder Suspect And Faked A Ghost Appearance By The Victim

In 1922, Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor was shot dead under circumstances so confusing that there are still people trying to figure out what the fuck happened. This triggered a media frenzy, to the point where over 300 people turned themselves in and confessed to the murder just to feel famous. A slightly more realistic candidate was Taylor's valet, a man named Henry Peavey. He was soon cleared, but journalists at The Los Angeles Examiner and New York Daily News thought he was hiding something -- his being black and openly gay surely had nothing to do with that -- and decided to find out exactly what using good old-fashioned journalism. And kidnapping. Mostly kidnapping.

Armed with fake police uniforms and phony warrants, two reporters showed up at Peavey's place and told him he was under arrest. The non-cops took Peavey to The Examiner's office in handcuffs and interrogated him for the next 12 hours straight without sleep. They also planned to hold him without food, but eventually gave up and sent out for a meal because they already had their first scoop: It turns out humans need nourishment to live.

Unfortunately, Peavey was a tougher nut to crack than the dumbass journalists had assumed. They even offered him a $1,000 "reward" for naming a killer (preferably a famous one), but that didn't work. That's when the kidnappers decided that they were going to have to deploy that wonderful combination of creativity, racism, and sheer bombastic idiocy that made Hollywood great. Bundling Peavey into a car, they drove him to a cemetery, where a reporter jumped out from behind a gravestone in a white sheet and shouted: "I am the ghost of William Taylor. You murdered me. Confess!"

via Wiki Commons "White guy in a sheet screaming at me? Must be Tuesday."

1

A Newspaper Told A Murder Victim's Mother That Her Daughter Had Won A Beauty Contest, Then Revealed She Was Actually Dead

The Black Dahlia murder is one of the biggest crime stories in California history, and naturally, the jam-brained insane-o-nauts at The Los Angeles Examiner were all over it. In fact, an Examiner reporter was the first person to reach the crime scene, and closed the corpse's eyes before the police arrived (1947 took a very lax approach to "tampering with a crime scene").

Not wanting to lose their head start, The Examiner cut a deal to let the cops use their wire photo system to send the victim's fingerprints to be identified by the FBI. In return, the LAPD agreed that The Examiner would have the right to announce her name before anyone else. That was already pretty shady, but the LAPD clearly didn't realize the level of sheer blank-eyed evil they were dealing with here.

As soon as the victim was identified as Elizabeth Short, the reporters went to work and tracked down her mother, Phoebe. But The Examiner had a problem. They were desperate to get the first interview with Phoebe Short, but were worried she wouldn't be in the mood to talk much if they told her about her daughter's brutal murder. So instead, they called up and said that they were doing a story on her daughter because she had won a beauty contest. Mrs. Short was delighted and chatted happily about her beautiful daughter's childhood and her love of films. Only at the end of the call did the reporter mention that, oh yeah, she was dead. Welp, bye!

Los Angeles Police Department We'll give you a moment to rage-vomit.