To hear Twitter users tell it, last night on CNN was one of the most disreputable in the network's history. "You might prefer streaming Al-Jazeera to watching CNN anchor giggle about Godzilla," wrote blogger and NPR contributor Maud Newton, in a widely retweeted statement. "Disgusting," chimed in hundreds of tweets. "F— you @CNN your anchor is giggling & talking about monster movies while you're showing waves sweep entire homes away," read another widespread retweet, originating from filmmaker and writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn. Many others called for the anchor to be fired.

In its defense, CNN tweeted today: "RE: questions about a CNN anchor laughing while covering the Japan earthquake, we checked. It appears it was a false post." Moments later, the network's Twitter feed added, "We checked on the Godzilla references too. That also appears to be a false post."

So who is correct — CNN or the Twittersphere? An analysis of the transcript and the Twitter record by Mashable brings us to the following conclusions:

1) The anchor in question, Rosemary Church of CNN's International Center in Atlanta, did not make any "Godzilla jokes." One of her guests, an American eyewitness named Matt Alt, describing the video footage, said "these waves of debris, it is almost like a monster movie."

Tweets at around this time slammed Alt, misidentified as a CNN reporter or anchor, for making a "Godzilla-esque" reference. Later retweets removed the "-esque."

2) Church's words could not be accurately described as "joking". Her tone, clearly irksome to many viewers, is another question. An anchor with some serious news chops — she covered 9/11 and the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, among other major events — Church also has a bubbly, Australian-accented voice. Some of her statements around 2:15am ET, according to the Twitter stream, may have sounded inappropriately jovial. That's when the earliest cluster of results for "CNN laughing" appear:

It was around this time that Church paraphrased Alt's comment about his Japanese wife being used to earthquakes and issuing orders. "She made a small joke about a caller's Japanese wife being calm," tweets journalist Michael Corey. "The joke wasn't offensive, just a joke in that situation was weird ... But live TV is hard, so I cut her a little slack. Not much." A CNN spokesperson admits that Alt "lightly chuckled," but that there was no laughter.

Some minutes later, Church interrupted a reporter on the scene to say that she was being "flooded with tweets." That set off another mini-firestorm on Twitter. Given the scenes of devastation on screen at the time, it was clearly a poor choice of words, but it does not appear to be an intentional joke.

3) In ascribing the criticism to "a false post," CNN is incorrect. That suggests a single influential Twitter user was behind the criticism. In fact, as the screen above shows, it emerged spontaneously from multiple independent sources at the same time.

Granted, Twitter is something of a digital echo chamber. Stewart-Ahn's tweet is still being retweeted, even after he admitted the misattribution (though he still believes Church covered the story "rudely and ignorantly" and still swears he heard her laughing.)

But pressed to locate the "false post" it tweeted about, even CNN itself admits there's no single source. "I don't know if anyone could point specifically to the flash point on social media that started the rumors," says Bridget Leininger, a spokeswoman for CNN. "All I can say is that no one at CNN joked, laughed or made a Godzilla reference on our live coverage."

Here, courtesy of Mediate, are some video clips of Church's coverage:





