Impish

I remembered the code word wrong: I thought it was "impishness;" must have merged the warning keyword and the retraction word. Remember when the Emergency Broadcast System warned of the end of the world? conelrad.blogspot has the 1971 war scare story.

A lot of radio stations ignored the warning, because even though it had the right codeword it was at the time scheduled for a test. And there was nothing (they knew of) on the international scene to merit worry of nuclear war. One of the commenters claims only 20 stations did what they were supposed to during the 40-minute mixup.

I'm not sure which is scarier: the far-reaching consequences of a small government screwup or the station managers who assumed that who assumed (correctly, this time) that the world would go on as usual because the news they had didn't include anything scary. We've started to learn about the close calls that officials kept secret. If something had slipped that EBS signal would have been the station managers' first warning that something was wrong. But the echo-chamber news business blanks out more and more, to the point where I wonder how many TV newsdesks really know what dangers there are.