Looks like someone didn’t get the memo. WGN Chicago urgently reported this morning on a plane crash “in the middle of the road” on the south side of the city. What the TV station didn’t realize was that it was a scene being filmed for NBC‘s freshman drama Chicago Fire. “One wing was knocked off; I don’t know if this just happened,” anchor Robin Baumgarten said at around 8 AM local time as the station’s Skycam tried to show the scene at the intersection of 29th and Martin Luther King Drive. “It looks like a giant hole in the street,” said fellow anchor Larry Potash. What the anchors could not see (as this photo from the Chicago Tribune displays), was that the area was covered in signage indicating filming was in progress. “All the usual protocol for this type of filming was followed,” said a spokesman for Universal TV, which co-produces the series with Wolf Films.
The station showed the scene for several minutes before Potash got word on air that what they were seeing was part of a TV production. “They might want to tell the news folks,” said an visibly annoyed Baumgarten. “Are you kidding me? 29th and King Drive, it’s OK. It’s all for a TV show, even though you see that plane in the road,” she added. The Chicago Fire Department admitted later that info about the filming was not widely distributed, says the Chicago Tribune, which is owned by the same company that owns WGN. “In the future, I’m asking my people to let me know so I can let the media know. News desks need to know,” Larry Langford, a CFD spokesman, said this morning.
This isn’t the first time Chicago Fire has mixed in a bit of real life in the city. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared in the October 10 pilot episode.
Related: ‘Chicago Fire’ Gets Back-Nine Order
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I wouldn’t blame the CFD too much. Robin Baumgarten is the single worst news anchor I’ve seen anywhere in the country. She is a Kohl’s cashier in Mom jeans masquerading as a journalist.
Larry Potash is OK, but that whole show in general is more of a work of comedy or the TV equivalent of a morning drive time radio show versus any sort of legitimate news program. It makes soft news shows like Good Morning America and Today look like serious documentaries in comparison.
Congrats, Baumgarten and Potash, you have just entered the honor roll of local anchor buffoons, no doubt your work will soon be immortalized on youtube as well. Instead of demanding the overworked location managers come to you, you might raise your game a little above the Ron Burgundy level by, oh, say, sending someone to confirm something before you report it on air. But then again, that would mean you’re an actual journalist and not someone who reads words off a teleprompter.
@seriously, not their fault, they were being fed information by producers who were calling for the shots.
I call BS! Ever think it was a real plane crash and the media is using this TV show as a cover?! Probably some top secret government junk on board like Sarin or Trioxin.
Let’s just call it “method report.”
It’s great publicity for Chicago Fire they should do this more often try to fool local news shows into thinking their disasters are real.
So, I love how they’ve pretty much blocked every uploaded video of what must have been an awkwardly hilarious few minutes.
Oop, found it on WGN’s website and funny enough, the video is titled “TV News Fail” lol
Here’s the video all three minutes of it I don’t blame them for being fooled the camera angle that they were looking at made it seem real.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/local-news-crew-fooled-learns-on-air-breaking-plane-crash-is-staged-for-television-show/
Instead of being visibly annoyed, maybe Baumgarten should have been RELIEVED! Or maybe she would have preferred a death toll. Ugh!
The city and the producers of this show (which will probably get cancelled in 2013) should have alerted the media about what was going on and that the situation transpiring there was all for the show, but WGN-TV should have also done some due diligence on their end before reporting this as fact. They’re doing too much fooling around over there and they need to tone it down somewhat and distinguish what is real and fake. Baumgarten was a former traffic reporter who got elevated to co-anchor there but she can’t be any worse than Erin McElory, who is the worst of the anchors at that station, another traffic reporter pretending to be a news co-anchor.
Its actually a good show and I doubt it will be canceled. I think the women reporter is a complete idiot. She seemed so pissed that it wasn’t a real crash! How pathetic!