The American legacy media screeched in indignation when President Trump lambasted them as “fake news”. Then they spent the next three years proving him right. We’ve perhaps reached peak fake news when a major media company is caught red-handed peddling undeniably fake news – yet still refuses to admit it.
When ABC News aired a segment that it claimed “show[ed] the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad two nights ago”, that claim was quickly proven false. ABC is refusing to come clean.
A spokesperson for ABC News told Pluralist that fact-checking efforts were complicated by the belief that the source of the footage was located in a “sensitive position on the border” of Syria and Turkey. Because of “security concerns,” the video that the source provided was “difficult to verify,” the spokesperson said in an email.
However, after ABC News aired the video on “World News Tonight” Sunday and on “Good Morning American” Monday, internet sleuths quickly revealed that it apparently hadn’t come from Syria at all. Rather, the rapid gunfire and explosions in the footage exactly matched a video of a nighttime military show at a Kentucky gun range, which was uploaded to YouTube in April 2017.
Not only was the video not what ABC claimed it was but it has also been clearly altered in order to further the ABC’s narrative.
The ABC News video appeared to have been edited to exclude people holding up their phones to record the military show, which was held at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point […]
In response to the pushback, ABC News issued a correction and removed the video from its website […] However, ABC News stopped short of admitting that the video is fake and denied requests by other press to explain how it ended up on TV.
This is no small matter. Individual journalist’s careers have ended over less. When Pulitzer winning photographer Narcisco Contreras photoshopped a colleague’s digital camera out of the background of a dramatic Syrian war photograph, he was immediately sacked and all his images were removed from the AP public archive. Brian Walski was sacked by the LA Times in 2003 after digitally altering an Iraq war image.
The [ABC News spokesperson] downplayed any mistake on the part of ABC News, saying that their uncertainty about the video was “why our correspondent was careful to describe it on air” […]On “World News Tonight,” anchor Tom Llamas delivered a dramatic introduction to the footage, saying […]“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town,” he continued. “The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS.”
The graphic on the screen read “Slaughter in Syria.”
pluralist.com/abc-news-fake-syria-video-came-from-sensitive-source-on-border/
So, did ABC News knowingly run fake news, or were they duped? Did ABC themselves alter the video to remove the people holding mobile phones? If so, that would be a tacit admission that they knew it wasn’t what they said it was.
The generous (and probably correct) assumption is that ABC was given the video by a “source” and ran it without question. Yet, even that raises damning questions about the legacy media’s lack of critical evaluation. In the Trump era, the legacy media have abandoned not just any pretence of impartiality, but all vestiges of propriety and skepticism.
After all, this is the same legacy media who willingly fell for the “OK sign” and “Gorilla Channel” hoaxes.