Media terrorism?

And Now The WeatherJanuary 04, 2008

From Sky News Europe Correspondent Greg Milam
A touch of frost, snow on high ground, winds from the west by lunch-time – how about a nuclear mushroom cloud over the mountains?
A little light Armageddon is what Czech TV was reporting during an early morning weather forecast as viewers watched the mushroom cloud billowing up over a beauty spot in Bohemia.
Luckily (for all of us) it turned out to be a hoax, the work of an ‘art collective’ which had hacked into the webcam images.

Unluckily (for the ‘art collective’) the law didn’t see the funny side. Six members have been charged with propagating false information and scare-mongering and could face three years in prison.
The group, called Ztohoven, has defended its actions. In a statement it said: “We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group, our aim is not to intimidate the society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on daily basis both in real world and in the world created by the media.”
They went on: “This group attacked the space of TV broadcasting. It distorted it, questioned its truthfulness and its credibility. It drew attention to the possibility of using images of the world created by the media in place of the existing, real world. Is everything we see daily on our TV screens real? Is everything presented to us by the media, newspapers, television, the internet actually real?”

As a wise man once said: “Save it for the judge, buster.”
You do have to admire the understatement of Czech TV in all of this: “It could have frightened a lot of people,” they said. Yes, if a lot of people were watching, it probably would have frightened them.
But what is a little embarrassing for the Czech media world is that last month Ztohoven won a competition for young artists run by National Gallery.
As part of the prize, the National Gallery will buy the winning work, called Media Reality, for about £9,000. ‘Media Reality’ includes video of the simulated atomic blast and snippets of the artists hacking into Czech TV broadcasts.
By the way, if divided into three words, Z-toho-ven means “out of it” in Czech, but when spoken, it can also be understood as, well, “a lot of human waste”.

Written by Sky News, January 04, 2008