CBS cut into the last five minutes of 'CSI: NY' to bring viewers the news of the Palestinian leader's death on Wednesday evening, in a special report that saw the Viacom-owned network beat its rivals ABC News and NBC News to the story.
Viewers on the East Coast missed the final few minutes of the show and the answer to the week's whodunnit of the second spin-off series from CBS's hugely popular 'Crime Scene Investigation' franchise.
CBS was reminded just how popular 'CSI' is as it was bombarded with complaints from angry fans.
CBS said that news of Arafat's death was not sufficient reason to break into top rated 'CSI: NY', which pulls in around 16.7m viewers a week. The network was quick to blame an over-enthusiastic news producer for the error, who will know better next time than to deprive viewers of their crime fix.
"An overly aggressive CBS News producer jumped the gun with a report that should have been offered to local stations for their late news. We sincerely regret the error," the network said yesterday in a statement.
To make it up to viewers, CBS plans to rebroadcast the entire episode in place of a rerun for the original 'CSI' tonight.
The original plan had been to run a text crawl along the bottom of the screen should Arafat die during prime time.
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