On Friday, a young mother posted a story to her blog claiming that, while going through security at an airport in Atlanta, government agents took her baby out of her sight for several minutes. The story, as they say, went viral.
“Panic set in. My hands began to shake. My body was sweating. My breath was short and my heart was racing. They had taken my child and not told me. Jackson was out of my eye sight. I could not see my son,” wrote the woman, Nic.
Hours later, the Transportation Security Administration’s blog posted a video that shows the woman going through security, with her child either in her arms or directly next to her at all times.
The TSA’s immediate response, on Twitter and on its blog, squashed an internet meme that had been catching like wildfire — a meme that had the potential to do serious public relations damage to the agency.
Here’s how it happened:
Nic, a freelance writer who blogs at My Bottle’s Up, was in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport on Thursday. That night, she tweeted that TSA agents had taken her child away for several minutes after his pacifier clip set off the metal detector. Her tweets induced a wave of support from her followers, many of whom urged her to post the entire story online.
After some waffling — she thought she might try to sell the story instead of posting it to her personal blog — she posted the story on Friday. The link was re-tweeted far and wide.
At some point, “Blogger Bob,” a TSA flack who writes for the agency’s blog, caught wind of the story. He posted a video, pulling together clips from several security cameras, of Nic passing through security with her son. In the video, the two are never separated.
“After watching the video footage, you’ll see the video clearly shows that this individual was never separated from her baby by TSA,” reads the post.
Most strikingly, in her original post, Nic says that while a female security guard was checking her with a metal detector wand, her baby was no where in sight. Nic says she was screaming, crying and begging to know where her baby is.
In the video, her son is sitting in his stroller, directly next to her the entire time she’s being searched by the guard.
Nic confirmed on her blog that it is her in TSA’s video in a second post. But, she wrote, “In the video, it looks as though my son is playing happily in his stroller while I am being searched with a wand. Obviously this is the big discrepancy with my story, since he was not in my sight at that time, and one that I too am thoroughly looking into.”
TSA spread their debunking post via Twitter, sending it directly to people who had re-tweeted Nic’s original story. News organizations that had picked up her story, including Consumerist, updated their posts.
The agency also added uncut video from nine different security cameras Sunday night.
Whether Nic’s story is a hoax, an exaggeration or something else is hard to explain. However, unless the TSA video has been drastically altered, her story just doesn’t hold water.
Either way, the TSA’s speed and deftness with new media tools helped stave off what could have been a public image disaster for the agency.
