What you didn't know was happening at RLC

While 1,700 restaurant leaders quietly listened to this morning’s line-up of speakers at the Restaurant Leadership Conference, we at the press table were frantic. A tweet from AP delivered the breaking news that two bombs had detonated at the White House, injuring President Obama.

You probably know by now that the report was bogus; someone had hacked the AP’s twitter account and pushed out the fake attention-getter. The clarification came quickly, but not fast enough for those of us in the back. Could this development be true? If so, we owed everyone in attendance a heads-up on news of that import. So we scrambled to see what we could find, scouring news sites and looking at other media’s tweets.

While we were jumping around the internet, AP regained control of its Twitter account and gave the stand-down alert. But by that time, tweets were starting to appear about the Wall Street crash that was triggered by the fake report. Was that development true?

Fortunately, the media were abuzz over both developments by then. But it was a drama that most attendees of RLC missed entirely. Not us at the press table in the back.