Widespread reports that 30 minutes of porn aired Thanksgiving evening on CNN are hilarious, but there’s not much proof of this happening.
Numerous news outlets reported Friday that cable provider RCN inadvertently aired a half hour of explicit footage on the CNN TV channel in Boston.
RCN Boston Senior Vice President Jeff Carlson said on Friday there was no evidence anything went wrong with the broadcast.
“Regarding the reported incident involving CNN in Boston, RCN has no evidence this occurrence took place on the CNN feed. We have not had any other reports of this incident other than this single customer’s tweet,” Carlson said in a statement. “Our review of network operations and our call center phone logs during the last evening show no indications that this impacted any other customer than the one single customer. Only a technical review of the individual’s equipment involved could ascertain how this might have occurred. We’ve confirmed that this one customer’s account is in proper working order.”
The single tweet that set off the craze came from user @solikearose, who posted around 10:30 p.m. that CNN was airing porn instead of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.” @solikearose ― who has since made their Twitter account private ― told the Boy Genius Report that the graphic footage went on for about 30 minutes before CNN cut out. According to BGR, @solikearose tweeted “half a dozen” screenshots of the porn, but only one pixelated image (seen above) has made the rounds in the media.
@solikearose also tweeted at cable provider RCN, which stated they hadn’t received any other reports about the porn problem.
But as Mediaite points out, it’s highly unlikely that if porn was blasting out at the entire city of Boston Thanksgiving evening, only one person would report the problem. HuffPost was unable to find any other tweets about the issue sent at the purported time that it happened.
CNN initially confirmed the incident to HuffPost, but later backtracked. “Despite media reports to the contrary, RCN assures us that there was no interruption of CNN’s programming in the Boston area last night,” a spokeswoman said on Friday.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean it was all a hoax. BGR suggested that it could be possible there was an issue that only affected @solikearose’s specific equipment.
Porn performer Christian XXX said on Twitter that the image featured him and fellow performer Riley Quinn. The screenshot was from the series “Transexual Babysitters,” he told HuffPost.
Christian thought the whole debacle was “pretty funny” when he first heard about it, but agreed that something about the news reports seemed off.
“Thirty minutes with no one catching it on CNN seems a bit dubious,” he said.
This story has been updated with a statement from RCN Boston.
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