Dateline: ATLANTA—Elderly oddball millionaire, Huey Longbottom, shuns the internet and receives all of his news from CNN, but taking no interest in the missing Malaysian plane, which CNN has covered exhaustively for several weeks, Longbottom orchestrated several bizarre spectacles to garner CNN’s attention and entice the news channel to exchange its lead story.
“I know a lot about the news,” insists Longbottom. “Even if CNN is a 24 hour cable news network, they often like to showcase only one story, pushing everything else to the margins. Also, sex sells and if it bleeds, it leads.”
With those principles in mind, Longbottom hired hundreds of performers and staged public orgies all across the United States. When the outdoor sexual extravaganzas alone didn’t attract CNN’s attention, Longbottom placed calls to the local churches, informing them that the sexual exhibitions were satanic in nature.
The resulting conflicts between the outraged Christians and the naked, sweaty, and copulating performers, who clashed in the streets of dozens of major cities, were covered by the local news channels but were picked up on CNN for only a short time before CNN resumed its coverage of the missing plane.
Said Longbottom, “I asked myself just what an obsessive rich man like me has to do to end CNN’s campaign to bore me to death. How many times do I have to hear that they’re still looking for the plane? It flew into the ocean. A couple hundred died. Big deal! Tens of thousands die on the highways every year.
“I just wanted some politics, some world news, but I don’t care for BBC or for any of the others news channels. Then I realized that the humping devil worshippers in fisticuffs with Christian zealots didn’t do the trick, because the story didn’t have legs, not for the big leagues.
“Don’t get me wrong, the staged events were plenty salacious, which was ideal. There were women with huge breasts straddling hooded men, being pelted with tomatoes by deeply offended Christians. All in broad daylight, mind you—and for hours on end: I’d paid off the police to give the networks a chance to pick up the story.
“But it just wasn’t enough. The missing plane continued to be found—on my television screen!”
Longbottom’s next gambit was to appeal to the superhuman vanity of CNN’s editors and newsreaders. Assuming that CNN would prefer to make itself part of a story even if it had only the flimsiest of pretexts to do so, Longbottom hired thousands of stunt actors to surround CNN Center in Atlanta, strip off their clothes and demand that CNN stop reporting on the missing plane.
CNN took the bait, relishing the opportunity to speak their name within a news story. But the allure of the missing plane was too strong and CNN shortly returned to speculating about how black holes or aliens might have swallowed up the aircraft.
“The real problem was that CNN was boring me to death for ratings,” said Longbottom. “Their ratings went up when they started reporting on that damned plane. The ratings actually doubled: they went up from the 104 folks who used to watch CNN to the 229 who became glued to their screens to learn the next non-event in the Malaysian Airlines saga.”
The determined Longbottom duly escalated matters by kidnapping all 229 of those regular CNN viewers and holding them in a warehouse. When the Nielson ratings came out, CNN appeared to have lost all of its viewers. The news network promptly dropped the missing airliner story and returned to speculating on the upcoming presidential election in 2016.
“I still remember the moment they dropped it,” said Longbottom. “CNN was in the middle of beating that dead horse and then they broke into the bogus breaking news story with a real newsflash: ‘CNN has lost its entire audience.’ The news anchors brought in experts to debate whether a falling tree still makes a sound even if no one’s there to hear it.
“It was fantastic. I’d accomplished the mission. Of course, I released the 229 hostages as soon as CNN lost its incentive to keep pounding away at that horse carcass. I hear most of my former hostages have stopped watching CNN because there aren’t enough missing planes anymore in its news coverage.”