NBC Duped NBC on Shyamalan

Within the first two minutes of the Sci-Fi Channel's lame documentary, "The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan," it becomes clear that all of the hype was phony. Sci-Fi claimed that it had begun a documentary about the film director, only to uncover some dark secret that turned Shyamalan against the project. Bravely, Sci-Fi would air it anyway, exposing some darkness from the director's personal life. The result was a stupid ghost story that was worth watching only for its horribly bad dialogue and to see how bad a train wreck would result.

And, yes, Sci-Fi and Shyamalan cooked up the whole phony controversey thing as part of a "guerilla marketing" campaign for Shyamalan's new movie, "The Village." Of course, they didn't have the guts to be actually "guerilla" about it as they had commercials for "The Village" during every commercial break.

An unnamed spokeman for NBC, which owns Sci-Fi, told the BBC that, "This marketing strategy is not consistent with our policy..."

But I bet what really ticks NBC off is that its MSNBC news unit got duped by the Sci-Fi people.

On June 16th, MSNB.com picked up an Associated Press story headlined "Profile of M. Night Shyamalan Goes Sour." You can read it here: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5211084

If the NBC news team can get freaking duped by one of the company's old cable networks, it's no surprise that they were also duped by the Bush administration's many pre-Iraq War lies. One thing's for certain -- NBC's news crews don't even know what's going on at the station's various TV units -- much less at the station's corporate parent, the mammoth General Electric.

By the way, MSNBC hasn't even printed a correction on the article, which is still on its Web site.