Story of flood at New York stock exchange is squelched : Tweeter resigns
IT was the line that got them all going: Three feet of water in the New York Stock Exchange! CNN with Piers Morgan at the helm and The Weather Channel reported it .
Piers show flood story not true!
CNN 's Ali Velshi , knee-deep in water in Atlantic City, commented on air ,"This will have an influence worldwide on people's wealth."
Erin Burnett said it was an "incredible thing" and a "record-making moment" and adding, "It's a wooden floor, and it's a historic building, the damage it could do would be amazing."
Trouble was, it wasn't true .
Politico's Ben White tweeted that a Stock Exchange official categorically denied it . One commentator tweeted a photo of a very dry Stock Exchange. A spokesperson for the NYSE then said the Weather Channel had issued an "egregiously false" report.
After following the trail to a National Weather Service message board, then to Twitter, it became apparent, said Adweek, that a user calling himself @ComfortablySmug (followed by dozens if not hundreds of reporters) was the source.
"He had been disseminating bad information all night—that ConEd was shutting down all power in New York City, that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was trapped in Manhattan, and other falsehoods, many of which were retweeted or re-reported."
By Tuesday, BuzzFeed had outed @ComfortablySmug; he is Shashank Tripathi, the campaign manager for Christopher R. Wight, a Republican Congressional candidate from New York.
Last night he resigned from Wight's campaign , offering sincere apologies for his "irresponsible" tweets.
"I wish to offer the people of New York a sincere, humble and unconditional apology," Tripathi said.
Of course, the dry-as-a-bone Stock Exchange was back in business earlier in the day.