WBZ-TV coup
On the morning of June 26, 1990, a small rebellion erupted at WBZ-TV in Boston, a broadcast facility that had been under military control for the previous seven days. The coup was planned the night before by three newscasters and six technicians, all operating in Studio 6. Five of these men played poker regularly, and six of the nine were already ill with the superflu. They felt they had nothing to lose. They collected nearly a dozen handguns. Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads. The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, but as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen.
The Seizure of the Studio
At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, the coup took place. The nine of them effectively captured the television station. The soldiers, who hadn't expected any real trouble from a soft bunch of civilians accustomed to reporting tragedy at long distance, were taken completely by surprise and disarmed. Other station personnel joined the small rebellion, cleared the sixth floor quickly, and locked all the doors. The elevators were brought to six before the soldiers on the lobby level quite knew what was happening. Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired.
The Uncensored Broadcast
Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast in the middle of a sentence, and heard him say, "Okay, right now!" There were scuffling sounds off-camera. When it was over, thousands of bemused viewers saw that Bob Palmer was now holding a snub-nosed pistol in his hand. A hoarse, off-mike voice yelled jubilantly: "We got em, Bob! We got the bastards! We got em all!" Palmer then faced into the camera again and declared that for the last seven days, the broadcast facility had been under guard by men purporting to be National Guardsmen. He stated that the news had been managed, that he had been given copy and forced to read it "almost literally with gun to my head," and that all of it regarding the superflu epidemic was "patently false." Lights began to flicker on the switchboard; within fifteen seconds every light was on. Palmer announced that they had film, taken clandestinely, and that they would run some of it. His face was replaced with shots of Boston General Hospital, where wards were crammed, patients lay on the floors, and nurses, many of them obviously sick themselves, wove in and out, some weeping hysterically. There were shots of guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles, and shots of buildings that had been broken into. Palmer then said quietly, "If you have children, ladies and gentlemen, we would advise that you ask them to leave the room." A grainy shot showed a truck backing down a pier over Boston Harbor, with a barge covered with canvas tarps below. Two soldiers in gas masks jumped down from the truck's cab, pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out.
The Aftermath
Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn't have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique. Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America.
