‘Oh my God!’: cicada crawls up CNN reporter’s neck on air

After 17 years underground, why not 15 minutes of fame?

A single cicada went viral on Thursday after crawling up the CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju’s neck while he was filming. The veteran reporter recoiled, exclaiming several expletives, as his colleagues apparently suppressed good-humored chuckles.

This cicada, presumably one of the brood X bugs that have recently surfaced to mate and then die as per their periodic cycle, appeared as Raju prepared to deliver a report. At first blush, the cicada almost looked like an ovular mic on Raju’s chest. Then, it ascended Raju’s lapel, ultimately winding around his collar.

Raju’s face stiffened a bit as he placed a hand at the back of his neck. “Ugh! Oh my God!” Raju remarked as he removed the insect from his neck. Profanity-blocking bleeps ensued.

“[Expletive] cicada! What the hell? Do I have more on me?” Raju said, turning so that colleagues could see his back. Then came another bleep as Raju asked whether any were in his hair.

“Where are all these [expletive] cicadas coming from?” Raju asked, looking up.

On Friday, Raju addressed the cicada incident on CNN’s New Day.

“The context here is important here,” Raju said. “A couple minutes before that happened, there was actually another cicada that allegedly fell out of my pocket. And that happened as I was waiting to go on.”

Raju said that a producer told him “‘a cicada just fell out of your pocket,’ and I saw it on the ground, and I was a bit stunned”.

“I was indoors – I had just come from outside about 30 minutes before,” Raju explained. “Perhaps a cicada, one of these buggers, jumped on me as I was running back into the Capitol.”

“It crawled up, I thought that was maybe the cord at the back of my neck and no, it was one of those buggers,” he said.

After Raju’s team reviewed the video, they were trying to decide what to do, “everybody on our team said the world needs to see this.” They enlisted the help of a producer’s 15-year-old daughter “to bleep out all my profanity”.

“I’ve got to tell you, those things gross me out,” he remarked.

The “New Day” segment featured the chyron “CNN’s MANU RAJU SURVIVES ATTACK BY CREEPY, CRAWLING CICADA.”