CNBC Fooled By Howard Stern Prank

You would think that if it involves Howard Stern, a network like CNBC would have been a bit more careful.

On their SiriusXM show this morning, Howard Stern and Andy Cohen orchestrated a prank by falsely announcing that Andy Cohen would be replacing Stern. As part of the joke, Cohen claimed Stern's channel would be rebranded as "Andy 100" and that Stern was leaving the satellite radio company entirely.

The ruse was so effective that it was reported as factual news by major media organizations. On CNBC's "Squawk Box," the announcement was detailed by hosts Andrew Ross Sorkin and Becky Quick, with the misinformation remaining uncorrected for over two hours. The Associated Press also fell for the prank, issuing a news alert about Stern's departure that they later had to formally withdraw.

 Andrew Ross Sorkin We've got some breaking news for you this morning. Howard Stern, officially splitting with Sirius XM after nearly 20 years. He had teased an announcement about the future on September 2nd's episode. That was then postponed until today, but when the show started this morning, Andy Cohen introduced himself and said, the channel will now be known as Andy 100. Cohen said the handoff was meant to be cleaner, and this morning's announcement wasn't how things were supposed to go. He said he's confident that Howard Stern will land on another platform soon, and we're going to try to dig into what's exactly happened here. Of course, Howard Stern had been paid I think something on the order of about $100 million.

 Becky Quick I mean, he was there when Sirius really took off. That was the thing that they built everything around. On him leaving Terrestrial Radio and going to that, it got a lot of people to actually subscribe in the very early days. Now, just last week, Scott Greenstein, who's the president and chief content officer at SiriusXM, was speaking at a Bank of America conference. He said that he wanted Stern to stay it's Sirius but that the deal would have to make sense so he said for all these years and right now as it is it is as important a content single piece of content as we've ever had makes you think you know there was speculation the time it would mean he would have a big pay cut makes you thinks that something broke down and how they would get some price.

Andrew Ross Sorkin ...So we're going to keep following the story.