CBS Admits Survivor Immunity Challenge 'Screw Up' and Payoff

Well, CBS has apparently finally spoken about the Survivor: Africa immunity challenge screw-up (see our article discussing the first allegations and our update looking at what Lex, Kelly, and Lindsey had to say -- or didn’t have to say). The New York Post is reporting that a Survivor spokesman admitted that Lex and Tom were both given the second-place prize of $100,000 (along with Kim, who had gotten second place on the show itself – Ethan’s first-place prize was unaffected). This corresponds to what we here at RealityNewsOnline figured had probably happened since Lex and Tom were the only two who would really have been negatively affected by the error.

As noted previously, producers thought that Kelly was the only female Survivor contestant with nothing pierced. However, it turns out that Lindsey is similarly unpierced, which means when Lex answered “Lindsey” in response to a question about this topic, he should have gotten it right (along with Kim, who answered “Kelly”). That one missed question was the margin by which Kim won immunity, causing Tom and then, after another challenge, Lex to be voted out.

The spokesman characterized the incident as “a screw up not a scandal” and said the producers dealt with it right away. This brings to mind questions of why they did not deal with other challenge problems when they first came up, such as when video analysis showed that Colby violated the rules of a challenge in Survivor 2 -- it was the rope course and the rules specifically stated that contestants had to keep at least one carabiner on the ropes at all times; yet Colby clearly took both off in the process of getting ahead of another contestant, and ended up winning. (You can see the evidence at SurvivorNews.net.) While this news was circulated on the Web, that’s as far as it went.

It is also interesting to note that CBS said nothing about this screw-up until the story broke at AllyourTV.com and was followed up by other websites (such as RNO) and print reporters started asking questions. There is no indication that CBS ever planned to have this information become public – they would apparently much rather have continued to hide their mistakes. It seems to me that if any other public figure did this, CBS news (among others) would have jumped on the story and called it a “cover-up” not just a “screw up.” While it is admirable that they took action to fix the error by paying Tom and Lex the second-place prize, they should also have disclosed the mistake to the viewing public.

As always, RealityNewsOnline will continue to watch this story and provide updates.

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