What would the American equivalent to this story be?

A fake news report in Georgia about a Russian invasion ignited widespread panic and now anger at the perpetrators.

The 20-minute broadcast Saturday night on the Imedi TV station showed footage of tanks rolling into Georgia taken from the 2008 invasion and said that Saakashvili had been assassinated. The station introduced the program as a simulation, but many who tuned in mid-way were convinced the news was real.

The Georgian opposition, depicted in the broadcast as assisting the fake Russian invasion, accused President Mikhael Saakashvili of signing off on the program in a bid to stoke fear and tarnish their image. The director of Imedi is a former Saakashvili government official. US and Russian officials have denounced the bogus report (see video clips from the report below)

“People went into a panic,” Bidzina Baratashvili, a former director of Imedi, told The New York Times, comparing the mock news broadcast to Orson Welles’s 1939 adaptation of “War of the Worlds,” which depicted an alien invasion and panicked many radio listeners.

People in villages bordering South Ossetia, which was invaded in the brief Russo-Georgian war two years ago, began evacuati and calls to emergency services skyrocketed, reports The Georgian Times. According to other reports, people placed emergency calls reporting heart attacks and rushed in a panic to buy bread.

I suppose the best idea might be if a broadcast had happened during the Cold War, during Walter Cronkite’s CBS News, of the Soviets sending a nuclear device into a city in the United States — say, a news-style focus of this “Day Called X“.  That would certainly have scared the multitudes.

A better grasp would align it to a partisan broadcast.  This is being characterized by the Georgian opposition as a political scare tactic by the Georgian government in the days leading to election.  So, I guess, in today’s terms…

… around about October 30, Fox News broadcasts a “simulation” news-cast that the California Appellate Court has mandated marriage licenses be allowed for Human — Horse partnerships.  Round table discussions on the implications of this ruling following — and oh boy is Sean Hannity mad.  Bill O’Donohue expresses his outrage, but alas this was the inevitable slippery slope.

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