[OB1kNOb]

"Yeah, right. It was a computer bug. That's the ticket!"

[Libertarian444]

[manwiththehands]

"No I didn't. Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!"

[SlowBoat407]

[Moonman62]

I can believe this is a malfunction. CNN is going out of business and they are probably using old and decrepit equipment.

[Gaffer]

This sounds like a bunch of BS...."we can't make it happen again....blah blah blah....it's just a machine...blah blah blah.....we're going to 'reboot' the machine from time to time...blah blah blah......

I got ONE question CNN....I have NEVER seen this "glitch on ANY news show or yours for that matter before....How will this 'ensure' it from happenening again?

This is all bullshit.

[counterpunch]

It's pretty obvious it was a control room visual cue.
But the very fact that speculation of a darker nature has had such legs is testament to the state of the American media and the public's opinion of it. The fact that it was so widely believed to be deliberate on the part of some anti-Bush agenda at work should serve as a wake-up call to CNN and the rest of the media. The fact that CNN was forced to defend against the suspicion demonstrates just how much they have lost credibility with the American public.

[Rippin]

I assume someone is going back to see if this has been happening for a while with people they hate and we just now caught one?

[add925]

CNX.....hmmmm, has a nice ring to it.

[CHICAGOFARMER]

About one year ago I saw the same situation, a X over a politican head figure. Just passed it off as a stupid control center tech. But now I believe it was on purpose.

sssssssssssssss

when are the control center technicians going to blog out on issue and tell the truth?.

[dfwgator]

"Riiiiight"

[NRA1995]

Yeah; it was the same computer bug that caused CNN Headline News to play the theme from The Jeffersons (Movin' On Up) in the background when they announced Condi Rice would be the new Secretary Of State last November.

[TXBSAFH]

Bovine excrement!!!!!!

[Unmarked Package]

CNN has been reduced to relying on computer errors now to rehabilitate their pathetic credibility. Their excuses are edging towards the realm of the supernatural. It's a case for the X Files worthy of an investigation by Mulder and Scully.

[kingu]

Ok, CNN... I'm sure that someone over there is monitoring how this explanation is going over, so let me explain it to you.

The edit bay computer can only go live over the air if the control room pulls the wrong feed. Those 'x's didn't randomly jump over to the live feed, someone screwed up, either by accident or on purpose.

Yes, someone was likely pulling snippets of the speech for later broadcast - duh, you're a news outlet, you do that. They were edit marks - again, fine, not a problem. But to claim it is a non-recreatable computer error? Bullpucky. The computer doesn't jump feeds, operators control that.

Standards and practices is something the networks live and breathe, something that CNN desperately needs to adopt. Pull the wrong feed for a story segment and the anchor chuckles and you either try it again or go onto another story. Pull the wrong feed during a single shot speech? The operator gets fired and the network makes public it's regrets because there is no reasonable excuse.

That you guys didn't fire the employee (doesn't really matter whom, actually, since we're not in your control room) and are hiding behind a 'bug' that supposedly 'comes up when you don't reboot' isn't going to fly. One more stick for the conspiracy theory people to whap you with, and well deserved for using such a flimsy excuse. Stupidity. There goes another few thousand viewers over to Fox.

[Grig]

What they really mean is that they can reproduce it without having someone there deliberately doing it (as it originally happened).

[WKUHilltopper]

Can't you all see somehow this is Bush's fault?


CXN (formerly CNN): "If Bush would have never won the election, Cheney wouldn't have been Vice President. Hence, if he were not Vice President, he'd never be broadcast during this time slot. We'd probably had a commercial running during this time frame so that "X" would have flashed up during this time slot. So, yes. It really is Bush's fault..."

[yarddog]

I don't trust CNN any further than I can throw Ted Kennedy, but it is possible.

I was recording an episode of "Smallville" and noticed in one scene there was a black "X" across the screen for about 10 seconds. It was thinner than the one over Cheney tho.

[tsmith130]

First of all, a switcher is a machine, not a person.

Garbage in, garbage out.

[SlowBoat407]

Clearly CNN does not have complete control of its equipment. It has fallen behind in its training and it has shown no plan for ensuring that the control room staff can stand on their own.

CNN should get out of the cable news business immediately, since it obviously went in with bad intelligence.