Belgium abolished.

mike65

Nice little media stunt here

Brussels, Belgium - Suddenly, and shockingly, Belgium came to an end late on Wednesday night.

State television broke into regular programming with an urgent bulletin: The Flemish-speaking half of the country had declared independence and the king and queen had fled. Grainy pictures from the military airport showed the dark silhouettes of a royal entourage boarding a plane.

Half-an-hour after RTBF's phony newscast that the "Flemish parliament has unilaterally declared the independence of Flanders" the station flashed the message: "This is fiction." But it was too late. Many Belgians had already fallen for the hoax.

Frantic viewers flooded the call centre, but the broadcaster later defended the programme, saying it showed the importance of debate on the future of Belgium.

The linguistic demons pitting Dutch-speaking Flemings in the North against the Francophones from Brussels and Wallonia in the South have been mostly quiet for the past two decades, ever since far-reaching autonomy was granted in the 1980s.

Independence, however, is not an aim of any of the major parties in power, whatever their linguistic preference. It explains why the programme was so widely condemned.

About the only people who enjoyed the stunt were the separatist far-right Flemish Interest party. It wants to get rid of king and country and thought it could see a flash of its future. - Sapa-AP

from guardian

Nervous embassies called the Belgian government to find out whether their job had been split in two.

"Ambassadors who were worried asked what they had to tell their capitals," the senate chair, Anne-Marie Lizin, told AP. "This fiction was seen as a reality and it created a catastrophic image of the country."

Mike.

Milktrolley

For anyone that's fluent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRtTvAZChd0

It says at the start that's it's fake. I guess people missed that bit, kind of like what happened here earlier this year when loads of people thought Sellafield had blown up (they were watching Fallout).

Ruth McAvinia reports on last night's Six-One.

monkeyfudge

Or two weeks ago when people thought aliens had invaded after a fake news report on the Late Late Toy Show.

Judt

Proving that it's not just gun-toting American's who can fall for these.