History IsThisThingStillOn / RealLife

* Famous British football manager turned commentator Ron Atkinson said, referring to black French player Marcel Desailly: "He is what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger." Although transmission in the UK had finished, his comment was broadcast to various countries in the Middle East. He had to resign from his job.

* A memoir written by an RAF Blenheim pilot during [=WW2=] relates how they paid particular attention to the position of a certain switch during their pre-flight check after a lewd discussion by the crew of a Blenheim regarding a newly-arrived WAAF was relayed live to the woman in question, who eventually ran screaming out of the radio room. The CO was not amused.

* In May 2023, Oakland Athletics announcer Glen Kuiper was recounting his and broadcast partner Dallas Braden's activities in Kansas City during an Athletics-Royals telecast (yes, at the same ballpark where Thom Brennaman made his aforementioned gaffe). While discussing their visit to the city's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum earlier that day, Kuiper inadvertently uttered the "n-word", prompting his immediate suspension and eventual dismissal from the team's broadcasts.

* In 2010, radio host Don Imus was heard mocking [=Kars4Kids=] on-air when their ad came on during a commercial break (the group is well-known for having a ''[[Horrible/{{Advertising}} very]]'' annoying jingle), telling them to go to hell, and that he'd donate his [[CoolCar Bentley]] to them.

* [[https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/ian-mckellen-broke-down-over--hobbit--green-screen-scenes.html During filming of]] Creator/PeterJackson's ''Film/TheHobbit'', Creator/IanMcKellen broke down crying upon seeing a scene with him and the dwarves would be done by green screen, with only pictures of the dwarves to indicate who's talking. He said to himself, "This is not why I became an actor" ...only for his mic to be on and the whole studio hearing it. Fortunately, Peter Jackson and the rest of the crew made up for it later, putting quite a bit of effort into making a personal "relaxation" space for Sir [=McKellen=] on the set to cheer him up. It worked.

* Former Kansas Senator, 1976 Republican Vice-Presidential and 1996 Presidential nominee and Senate Majority Leader UsefulNotes/BobDole became an example during his second run for President in 1988 when he was hoping to succeed incumbent UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan since Reagan was unable to run for a third term. Dole had won the Iowa Caucus in early February with his chief rival, Vice-President UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush, finishing in 3rd place behind not only Dole but longtime ''700 Club'' host Pat Robertson and looked to be ahead in the polling for the New Hampshire primary the following week, only for the Bush campaign to go on the attack, most famously with the "straddle" ad accusing Dole of straddling the fence on whether he would raise taxes or not. After Bush won the primary, he was being interviewed by [[Creator/{{NBC}} NBC Nightly News]] anchor Creator/TomBrokaw and closed by wishing his rivals for the Republican nomination good luck on the next major contest; the mostly-Southern Super Tuesday primaries. Dole, waiting to be interviewed by Brokaw and unaware he was on the air, answered with a blunt [[https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/us/bush-vs-dole-behind-the-turnaround.html "Stop lying about my record"]]. Dole's campaign never recovered, with him only winning a few Midwestern contests before Bush pulled away after Super Tuesday, resulting in Dole dropping out after losing the Illinois primary while Bush would go on to win the nomination and general election.

%% * From Website/OverheardInNewYork: [[http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/007282.html This quote]].

* In early 2022, Peyton Manning had a moment of this on his and his brother's "Manningcast" program during a Wild Card playoff game. Manning was having technical difficulties and apparently failed to realize that while his ''incoming'' audio wasn't working, his ''microphone'' was still functioning perfectly and broadcasting audio to the stream.

* In early 2022, Peyton Manning had a moment of this on his and his brother's "Manningcast" program during a Wild Card playoff game. Manning was having technical difficulties and apparently failed to realize that while his ''audio'' wasn't working, his ''microphone'' was functioning perfectly.

** Characterized Music/KanyeWest as a "Jackass" after antics at the MTV Video Music Awards. Many conservatives commented that they ''finally'' found something to agree with him on.

* Similarly to the Gordon Brown incident, during the 1989 election campaign, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke referred to a pensioner who had just harangued him during a meet-and-greet as a "silly old bugger". The muttered comment was recorded by a television crew accompanying the PM and quickly became front page news across the country.
* In 2009, Chilean senator Fernando Flores is about to finish an interview for the CNN Chile channel. His host makes some questions that he dislikes, then finishes the interview. Just before the transmision was about to finish, a pissed-off Flores rants about how the guy's questions were [[PrecisionFStrike "fucking dumb"]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqqD3b4ap78 among other things.]] That part was caught on-tape and then uploaded to Youtube... Flores did have a history of exploding at his interviewers, however, having simply stormed out of the set when he got upset at a reply before.

* The thoughts of Uruguayan President José Mujica about Agentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her late husband Néstor Kirchner were caught on video. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-YGTHUVQso And they weren't pretty.]]

* This destroyed the career of former Virginia Senator George Allen. In 2006, Allen was a former Congressman and Governor who was running for a second term against former Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb, with Allen also having been viewed as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 2008. Allen held a solid lead until August 11, 2006; on that day, Allen was caught on video using the ethnic slur "macaca" (a slur against Indian people) in the presence of a Webb staffer of Indian heritage. The controversy magnified by changing explanations from the Allen campaign, and separate controversies over Allen's comments attempting to deny and eventually downplay the Jewish ethnic heritage of his mother Henrietta. Similar uses of racial epithets during Allen's college years also began to crop up around this time. This led to Allen losing by just under 10,000 votes, with that race being the last to be called and which ended up swinging control of the Senate to the Democrats.

* With the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic making their normal in-person sessions too dangerous, many courts around the world have turned to telephone or video-conference to hold hearings. A hearing in the United States Supreme Court on a challenge to a provision of the Consumer Telephone Protection Act was interrupted by [[https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/06/politics/toilet-flush-supreme-court-oral-arguments/index.html the sound of a toilet flushing]]. Nobody is quite sure who that was.

* In 2019, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was caught on-mic referring to a police official as "this FOP [[note]] Fraternal Order of Police[[/note]] clown". Relations between Lightfoot and the police were already strained in the wake of the [=LaQuan=] [=McDonald=] shooting (where an officer shot an unarmed black man multiple times); the comment further exacerbated those tensions.

* Former Kansas Senator, 1976 Republican Vice-Presidential and 1996 Presidential nominee and Senate Majority Leader UsefulNotes/BobDole became an example during his second run for President in 1988, when he was hoping to succeed incumbent UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan since Reagan was unable to run for a third term. Dole had won the Iowa Caucus in early February with his chief rival, Vice-President UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush, finishing in 3rd place behind not only Dole but longtime ''700 Club'' host Pat Robertson and looked to be ahead in the polling for the New Hampshire primary the following week, only for the Bush campaign to go on the attack, most famously with the "straddle" ad accusing Dole of straddling the fence on whether he would raise taxes or not. After Bush won the primary, he was being interviewed by [[Creator/{{NBC}} NBC Nightly News]] anchor Creator/TomBrokaw and closed with wishing his rivals for the Republican nomination good luck on the next major contest; the mostly-Southern Super Tuesday primaries. Dole, waiting to be interviewed by Brokaw and unaware he was on the air, answered with a blunt [[https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/17/us/bush-vs-dole-behind-the-turnaround.html "Stop lying about my record"]]. Dole's campaign never recovered, with him only winning a few Midwestern contests before Bush pulled away after Super Tuesday, resulting in Dole dropping out after losing the Illinois primary while Bush would go on to win the nomination and general election.

* During the eighties and early nineties it was very common for US TV networks to transmit satellite feeds without any form of scrambling or encryption so anyone with a satellite dish and satellite TV tuner could view them. Because of this it was possible for people to watch (and record) satellite interviews as they were being conducted. For live broadcasts, the feed was usually set up far before the interview began and when the network cut to commercial or another segment of the program the satellite feed usually stayed on leading to many real-life instances of this trope. Several of them were collected in a documentary called ''Spin''.

* Another rather innocent thing. A local news station had an anchor who was feeling sick to his stomach, but [[TheDeterminator was going to do the broadcast either way since it was live and he had a devotion to his job]]. Eventually he started to feel sick during the broadcast and asked them to cut. The cameramen saw that he was getting pretty pale and sweaty, so they killed the video feed...unfortunately the audio was still being recorded, so viewers could hear the news anchor shout, "GET A BUCKET! QUI-" and then the sound of him throwing up on the floor, and it was broadcast live. [[NeverLiveItDown Twenty years after the incident, they still played that clip]].

* Legendary television newsman David Brinkley ran into this late in his career. Brinkley was co-anchoring ElectionNight coverage for Creator/{{ABC}} alongside Creator/PeterJennings in 1996; the last Election Night he would work prior to his retirement, and near the end of ABC's coverage Brinkley - thinking ABC had gone to commercial - described newly re-elected UsefulNotes/BillClinton as "a bore" and added "The next four years will be filled with pretty words and pretty music and a lot of [[PrecisionFStrike goddamn]] nonsense!". When colleague Sam Donaldson pointed out that they were still on the air; Brinkley responded with "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NiOaH0qJr4 Really? Well, I'm leaving anyway!]]". Brinkley would apologize on the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tLD6c_Ikc following week's edition]] of his political discussion show ''This Week'' (incidentally, the last one before his planned retirement) in a one-on-one interview with President Clinton.

* Back when Creator/OliviaMunn was part of ''Series/AttackOfTheShow'', she did interviews around E3 2010. On one night, she did an informal E3 stream with co-host Kevin in their hotel room. During the stream, Kevin made comments about Olivia's sex life; not amused, she decided to cut to commercial break and tell him off. Fast forward about four minutes later and she's about to turn the stream back on, but there's a problem...she never turned it off. She left ''Attack of the Show!'' later that year, although that was almost certainly unrelated to that incident since she went on to ''Series/TheDailyShowWithJonStewart''.

** Nancy Kerrigan also got caught making the comment, "This is so corny. This is so dumb. I hate it. This is the most corny thing I've ever done", while sitting beside Mickey Mouse during a Disney parade.
** When she later hosted ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'', during her monologue, she said that what she really said was "the most ''horny'' thing I've every done."

* During a group photo with his sons in 2005 while on a trip to Switzerland, then-Prince Charles quietly said "I can't bear that man. He's so awful, he really is," referring to then BBC Royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell. A boom microphone set up for the pool TV coverage easily picked up the comments which were widely broadcast.

--> '''Pilot:''' ''(finishing up an intended cabin broadcast)'' Again, welcome to New York, it's a beautiful evening here, about 70 degrees right now.\\

** A Southwest Airline pilot ranted to his co-pilot about the lack of SexyStewardess on his flights, and having to work with only gays, grannies, and overweight folks. Unknowingly, he had turned on the mic, broadcasting to everyone in Texas airspace, but didn't even stop when an air traffic controller tried to butt in.
** A Southwest pilot managed to [[http://consumerist.com/2013/11/14/southwest-pilot-learns-he-should-stick-to-words-like-descending-and-not-were-going-down/ broadcast "we’re going down"]] to the whole plane. In reality, the plane was in no danger; rather, the pilot, either not versed in or with a relaxed attitude to protocol, meant to say "we're descending" to air traffic control, but went with a more informal, yet equally disquieting phrase instead, accidentally broadcasting it over the plane's PA.

* During the filming of ''Film/TheJinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst'', a documentary filmed in 2013 about the investigations surrounding the long-time suspected murderer millionaire, Durst left to use the restroom after an interview with one a reporter, forgetting that his mic was on. The sound editor was then treated to the sound of Durst relieving himself... followed by his muttering of "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." Durst was arrested in 2015, following the release of the documentary. He was tried and found guilty of one of his crimes, but died before he could be tried for the other one.

* During the 2016 Republican primaries, Creator/{{MSNBC}} hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were roundly criticized by pundits and media ethicists for using their newscast to boost on-air for billionaire front-runner Creator/DonaldTrump. Eventually audio clips were leaked showing Scarborough and Brzezinski engaging in sycophantic banter with Trump, praising his poll performance and "wow moments." This didn't stop Trump from later repeatedly insulting them both on Twitter.

* Creator/{{CNN}}, covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention, cut to a live feed from producer Don Mischer's microphone, just in time to catch him upbraiding his staff for a mediocre balloon drop. ClusterFBomb [[http://youtu.be/9FTtIbkTWTY?t=1m46s with confetti!]]

* UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump's 2016 presidential campaign was subject to countless controversies that probably would've ended any other politician's career. On October 7th, 2016, blooper footage was leaked to NBC and ''The Washington Post'' from a 2005 interview between Trump and Billy Bush, then anchor for ''Access Hollywood'', in which Trump boasted that if you were a powerful Hollywood player you could "do anything, you can grab [women] by the pussy" and they'd let you. Trump talked at length about trying to sleep with Nancy O'Dell, Bush's ''Access Hollywood'' co-anchor, with Bush joking and playing along. NBC initially tried to shield Bush from scrutiny, but public outcry forced the network to suspend and eventually fire him]] from ''Today''.