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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

I really hope there's an incompetence (as opposed to just not caring about doing their job right) based explanation for this otherwise it calls all of ABC's other reporting into question as well as that of every similiar media company.

Edit: I'm genuinely curious why this getting down-voted?

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The only scenario I can think of that's merely incompetence is that someone outside of ABC sent them the video, claiming that it came from Syria, and ABC made no effort to validate that person's credibility.

If the video was produced anywhere inside ABC's organization, it would be dishonesty rather than incompetence. Anyone who downloaded a video from YouTube and edited out the people with phones at the bottom would have known that the video was not footage of a battle.

Agreed. Mislabeling tapes is a tradition at TV news.

In the 90s, Germany's largest public TV station accidentally ran the previous year's New Year's Address by the Chancellor. These speeches have a tendency to be extremely bland, and according to lore nobody noticed the error until the very end when they mentioned the (wrong) year.

Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by politics.

Please tell me this has a name.

Hanlon's Rogaine?

I’m intentionally misquoting Hanlon’s Razor.

Even if it's incompetence, I suspect it will still be based on some element of media bias. It's just a matter of who will get blamed.

Like if the film editor (or librarian or intern) that filed the original footage thought it would be funny to label a bunch of gun-loving Kentuckians as terrorists. Video gets tagged "Terrorists waging jihad on Americans. Automatic gunfire and explosions at night"

A few days/hours later someone searches the library for recent footage of Syria, and the keywords fit.

So far you are looking at this as though ABC perpetrated this.

One unexplored possibility is that the footage was provided by some Kurdish group.

Kurdish militias are capable of spreading propaganda based on false media. They are clearly doing it today. Look at the comments here: https://twitter.com/PYD_Rojava/status/1182939359999332355?s=...

I suspect someone sold them the altered footage and they rushed to get it on the air. Either for a financial benefit, or to specifically get them to air falsified footage. (Project Veritas?) Responsibility still lies with ABC to verify.

It's a shitty situation, I doubt ABC knew it was footage from the US. But how do you verify that a random video clip, filmed at night, actually took place in Syria (assuming the crowds were cropped out before they saw it, otherwise its fairly obvious)

I might be treading on thin ice here, but more cultural diversity at ABC could have prevented this. The Knob Creek machine gun shoot is kind of famous in gun-enthusiast circles. With the number of machine guns being shot and the number of hollywood style gasoline explosions going off, I do think I would have recognized the source of this video if it were presented to me without context. There are many videos of this event from different years and from different spectators, but they all generally look about the same; tons of tracers and tons of gasoline fireballs.

I am not a combat veteran so the following is speculative, but I suspect the footage may look suspect to combat veterans as well. Big orange fireballs like that are from milk jugs of gasoline, not high explosives. That sort of thing is done for visual effect, not lethal effect. Certainly vehicle fuel will catch fire on battlefields, but I can't help but suspect the video would look "off" to a combat veteran.

You can start by asking the source who they are, who they work for, how they came to be in Syria, etc. Then try to confirm that information independently. That's what journalists are supposedly trained to do. If the source can't be corroborated, don't use the video. (Just like a journalist wouldn't attribute a quote to someone if it couldn't be verified.) Any reputable news organization would have a fact-checking department that does this kind of stuff.

TV news stations will almost never pay for just anybody's footage. At the very least, they will work with locals that have some track record.

They might sometimes take youtube footage, foreign broadcasts, or material provided to them by parties to the conflict. But those tend to carry prominent labels and aren't paid for.

This is not true. If you have newsworthy footage, they'll pay. The problem is that you're usually not the only one with the footage, and a lot of people like to see their name on the news!

>“This video right here appearing to show the Turkish military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town,” Muir said. “The Kurds, who fought alongside the US against ISIS now horrific reports of atrocities, committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.”

One possibility is that it was Kurdish sources who supplied the video to ABC, falsely claiming that it was a fight against them in Syria. If that turned out to be the case, then would the media fess up to being duped by them? It would force ABC to change their narrative on Syria - something that I believe they're unwilling to do, no matter what.

Are the downvotes against me for suggesting that entities claiming to represent Kurdish militias are capable of spreading propaganda based on false media? They are clearly doing it today. Look at the comments here: https://twitter.com/PYD_Rojava/status/1182939359999332355?s=...

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