Almost as soon as the Super Bowl came of age as a festival of American excess, thriller writers began to imagine how terrorists might target the game for attack. Thomas Harris published “Black Sunday,” in 1975; in the novel, secular Palestinian terrorists collaborate with a disgruntled American veteran of the Vietnam War to strike a Super Bowl by turning a blimp into a weapon of mass destruction. (Harris went on to write “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal.”) In 1991, Tom Clancy published “The Sum of All Fears,” one of his Jack Ryan bestsellers. In that yarn, Arab nationalists (whose novel-reading habits happen to include “Black Sunday”) detonate a nuclear bomb at a Super Bowl in order to preëmpt peace in the Middle East (as if).
When the lights went out at the Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday night, at the start of the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, it seemed almost certain that an innocent electrical blackout had occurred. A similar blackout disrupted a Monday Night Football game in San Francisco the year before last. Yet surely I was not the only viewer who wondered for a minute or two if some form of Harris’s dark vision had been fulfilled.
The initial period of the blackout was especially unsettling. It was like a nationally shared, television-enhanced experience of a stroke. CBS, this year’s Super Bowl broadcaster, maintained its visual signal, but the network initially lost audio. The broadcast’s director selected a field-level camera angle that pointed up to the half-darkened stadium lights, in a mute effort to show what was going on. Yet, without the benefit of commentary, viewers could only guess at what had transpired.
The first human response to such an unexpected disruption of a ritualized social experience like Super Bowl–watching is disorientation and unease. The brain of a journalist quickly jolts into a second response: breaking news! Surely, I thought upon my couch, CBS, the network of Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather, and “60 Minutes”—the network that had lately recruited Charlie Rose to anchor its morning show—would tear into this story.
It did not. What followed was embarrassing and irresponsible. The blackout lasted thirty-four minutes. During that time, CBS acted as if it possessed no news division. It relied on James Brown, the congenial jock-wrangling anchor of “The NFL Today,” to handle the story. He and his fellow commentators—retired quarterback Dan Marino, retired N.F.L. coach Bill Cowher, and retired tight end Shannon Sharpe—acted as if the unexplained loss of electricity in a stadium filled with seventy thousand-plus people during the most-watched American television event of the year was just a twist in the story of who would win the football game, and nothing more.
Surely there were other questions to ask as the minutes ticked by: Why did the N.F.L. fail, throughout the entire interruption, to provide an informed spokesman to explain the problem and the plan to fix it? Who was responsible for the stadium’s operations? What did the local utility, Entergy, have to say? Could the mayor of New Orleans, who was surely in the stadium, be summoned on camera?
“We were asking everybody at every position what was happening and the fact of the matter is we just didn’t know,” Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, told the Los Angeles Times afterward. In retrospect, McManus said, he would have pushed harder to force the N.F.L. to put a representative on camera.
The ultimate responsibility for the broadcast belonged to Les Moonves, the president and chief executive of CBS. Moonves spent the run up to the big game talking to reporters about how many thirty-second ads CBS had sold at record four-million-dollar prices.
Why didn’t he throw the broadcast to his news division in New York for at least an interval, to signal to viewers that the network recognized that something unusual and newsworthy had just occurred, and to attempt to inform them, as best as possible, with reliable reporting?
Moonves told the Times that he knew he had the option to switch to CBS News in New York, but “we were told it would be twenty minutes.…We knew it wouldn’t be down for hours.” Even so, why did CBS not immediately scramble its news producers to hunt down subjects for on-air interviews? Why was there no off-air reporting relayed from CBS News to James Brown about whether there was any indication of foul play, or any information at all available beyond the no-commenting, self-protecting public-relations arm of the N.F.L. juggernaut, to which we have become all too accustomed during its systematic campaign of denial about football-related concussions?
Even the sports banter on the “NFL Today” set was timid, seemingly self-modulated to give no offense to CBS bosses, New Orleans, or the N.F.L. What about the risk of hamstring pulls and the like to players who have an unscheduled thirty-minute cooldown right after halftime? We watched players stretching for dull minute after minute but heard little more than vague speculation about “momentum.”
CBS buys the rights to Super Bowl broadcasts to make buckets of money, not to serve the public. Yet there were an estimated one hundred and eight million Americans watching the broadcast. The network’s obligations to such a vast viewership should have led it to privilege the imperatives of journalism over those of commerce.
By the end of the evening, six reporters, working as a team from the newsroom of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, had managed to force out a non-explanation explanation of the blackout from Entergy and the Superdome’s operators. Those entities said, in a joint statement, that the stadium’s sensors had detected some “anomaly” in the electrical feed from Entergy and had initiated automated protocols to turn off lights. (The Times-Picayune has the same parent company as The New Yorker.) Yet the statement offered no clue as to what the underlying cause of the reported anomaly had been. The essence of the public-relations messaging was “Everything worked exactly as it was supposed to do, and therefore the lights went out for thirty minutes.” It was surprising that the joint statement did not go on to chastise other Super Bowl hosts for failing to have blackouts of their own, since they are apparently signs of a well-oiled utility machine.
The Times-Picayune also reported, carefully but suggestively, about records from stadium-authority meetings that took place during the autumn of 2012. The meeting minutes suggested that the authorities and Entergy were wrestling with “emergency” work on the feed intersection between the utility and the stadium, to address the extraordinary demands of the Super Bowl. The minutes and records the Times-Picayune speedily dug out on deadline on a Sunday night were presumably online—that is, enterprising CBS News producers might have discovered them on the fly, too.
This was not “Black Sunday,” of course. News of utility- and stadium-management failure is not, as a category of journalism, especially exciting. And yet, what if it had been terrorism? The Super Bowl blackout was an arresting if ultimately inconsequential exercise of the possibilities Harris had imagined. And whence did Harris’s fevered thriller idea arise? He wrote his novel in the aftermath of the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, where Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes. His thriller was not an invention; it was an extrapolation of recent history.
Munich’s shadow has informed the planning of every network broadcaster responsible for Olympics coverage in the four decades since. Disaster and counterterrorism preparations are a staple of pre-Games coverage. Network planners take for granted that they must be prepared to convert sports broadcasts to breaking-news broadcasts at any time.
“It was like there was another event inside an event,” Moonves told the Times. Another term for that might be news. “We heard everything from hackers to people who had bet on San Francisco to Beyoncé draining all the energy out of the place at halftime,” Moonves continued. And yet his network made no effort on air to sort rumor from fact or to acknowledge the cacophony of questions and speculation coursing through Twitter feeds. CBS rehearsed Beyoncé’s halftime performance to within an inch of her dance-step stage marks, but the network of Edward R. Murrow had no plan for the unexpected.