Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast

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

Producers at the Imedi television station 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 missed.

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 Tbilisi, the capital, that Russian bombers were airborne and heading for Georgia, that troops were skirmishing to the west and that a tank battalion was reported to be on the move.

The broadcast showed tanks rumbling down a road, billowing exhaust, along with jerky images of a fighter jet racing out of the sky and dropping bombs.

People went into a panic, Bidzina Baratashvili, a former director of Imedi, said in a telephone interview from Tbilisi. He compared the mock news broadcast and its effect on the population to the radio depiction of an invasion from Mars in Orson Welless 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 Tbilisi, where restaurants were packed on Saturday night, rumors swirled of a Russian invasion. Adding to the alarm, when people reached for their cellphones they found that the network had been overloaded.

If you hear that war started, of course you run for the bank machine, then run home, its natural, Jumber Jikidze, a taxi driver in Tbilisi, said in a telephone interview, describing the scene as a little chaos that lasted for about three hours. The radio station Echo of Moscow reported that residents of Gori, a city that was bombed during the recent war with Russia, left their apartments for the streets as the news anchor read bulletins about the approach of Russian bombers.

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

The governments treatment of its own people is outrageous, said Nino Burjanadze, an opposition leader whom the mock newscast depicted as greeting the Russians with a smile, according to Agence France-Presse.

The television station clearly identified the program as fictitious before the broadcast began. But viewers who tuned in later would have had to rely on clues. The fighting in the video was taking place in the summer, for example, not in March. The report sketched a scenario in which Russia intervened to quell domestic unrest in Georgia after a disputed election and to support a peoples government of opposition leaders who had overthrown Mr. Saakashvili. 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 Russia.

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[PoorSlothtrop]

beautiful.