ABC shows Kentucky footage and claims it is in Turkey

It's a shame, there's so much real slaughter footage to go around.

Should they now be considered #fakenews?

They made a mistake and withdrew the video after questions about the accuracy were raised. It happens.

Arcangl86 said:

They made a mistake and withdrew the video after questions about the accuracy were raised. It happens.

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On a frequency too high for a news organization. Same can be said about a lot of Western news media nowadays.

IceJad said:

On a frequency too high for a news organization. Same can be said about a lot of Western news media nowadays.

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What other instances like this have happened with ABC?

Arcangl86 said:

What other instances like this have happened with ABC?

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Brian Ross comes to mind

It happens. HOW does it happen?!!?! Someone tell me how a leading big 3 network news agency that's been producing news for decades gets years old footage of a gun show "night shoot" in Kentucky and mistakes it for breaking news footage of a war in Syria?

Walk me though it, please.

hislegacy said:

How can you believe anything from them?​

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I don't know - you tell us. You continually post junk from sources a lot more questionable than ABC, so one would assume that you have managed to retain trust in them. How should the rest of us go about retaining our trust in ABC?

abysmul said:

It happens. HOW does it happen?!!?! Someone tell me how a leading big 3 network news agency that's been producing news for decades gets years old footage of a gun show "night shoot" in Kentucky and mistakes it for breaking news footage of a war in Syria?

Walk me though it, please.

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Depends. If this had merely been used as b-roll, then I'd probably chalk it up to something getting mislabeled in their video library. But since it was featured repeatedly, then I'm gonna guess it was a combination of deliberate trolling on the part of whomever mislabeled it and sent it to ABC and some really sloppy fact checking on the part of ABC.

iluvatar5150 said:

I don't know - you tell us. You continually post junk from sources a lot more questionable than ABC, so one would assume that you have managed to retain trust in them. How should the rest of us go about retaining our trust in ABC?



Depends. If this had merely been used as b-roll, then I'd probably chalk it up to something getting mislabeled in their video library. But since it was featured repeatedly, then I'm gonna guess it was a combination of deliberate trolling on the part of whomever mislabeled it and sent it to ABC and some really sloppy fact checking on the part of ABC.

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So you think someone trolled ABC, and sloppy fact checking?

Any chance another option is that a narrative was being pushed and someone found "scary war footage" to make the footage fit the narrative of the story?

abysmul said:

So you think someone trolled ABC, and sloppy fact checking?

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I don't know that I'd bet money on that being what happened, but it seems plausible. That's exactly the sort of thing the 4chan crowd would try to pull.

Any chance another option is that a narrative was being pushed and someone found "scary war footage" to make the footage fit the narrative of the story?

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It's one thing to find "scary war footage" and just run it as b-roll (Which, if you're not familiar, is footage that's spliced in to fill out space in the background. It's usually thematically related to the story being told, but depending on what sort of journalistic standards are in place in a given situation, not necessarily from the actual event being described). But this was being used as featured video, with anchors describing it as footage from Syria.

It's possible somebody initially intended it to only be b-roll - or maybe even temp footage intended to be replaced with real stuff later - and then there was some sort of miscommunication or oversight wherein somebody further down the pipeline believed it to be actual footage. Granted, I know less about the news world than I do about other media, but if they're at all similar, it would hardly be the first time that temp content got left in by accident.

But I'm skeptical that there was any sort of high level decision to deliberately use this footage in a fraudulent manner - not because I necessarily have a high opinion of ABC (though I would expect that to be a bit beneath them) but moreso because this kind of thing is so easily found out and there would be no upside for them to fake it. It's not like they grabbed some obscure footage from some remote country - it was from a fairly popular event in the US. Trying to pull a fake like that is just stupid.

Well, this is what some would think a turkey would do.

but

Possibly, it was meant as a depiction. After all, the reporters might not have been allowed into such a situation, but it could represent what they knew was happening. I think it would be kind of hard for directors to accept a video like that from someone they knew was not an established source. How do you accidentally pick a file footage from years back and make it prime time news????

But if they really did stuff like that, it looks as though there would be no . . . n-o . . . structures remaining where the explosions were going off. So, that could have been photographed, afterward. Air photography could show that, too.

Or, they really are turkeys who wanted to make President Trump look bad.

I'm born in raised in small town USA, I worked at a local TV news station years ago (collage), and my wife has worked in print news for over 2 decades... I find it hard to fathom this a just sloppy work at a major news outlet, sorry.

Couple that with the over the top dramatic reading of the copy and the fact that the raw footage literally shows tents set up to watch the shoot and a sea of spectators filming the shoot with their cell phones... I don't buy it.

This wasn't sold to the viewing public as B roll, if you actually watch the usage of this video on ABC.

abysmul said:

I'm born in raised in small town USA, I worked at a local TV news station years ago (collage), and my wife has worked in print news for over 2 decades... I find it hard to fathom this a just sloppy work at a major news outlet, sorry.

Couple that with the over the top dramatic reading of the copy and the fact that the raw footage literally shows tents set up to watch the shoot and a sea of spectators filming the shoot with their cell phones... I don't buy it.

This wasn't sold to the viewing public as B roll, if you actually watch the usage of this video on ABC.

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Right, it was sold as actual footage. The fact that it came from a well-attended event in the US is why I'm skeptical that the bigwigs at ABC were deliberately trying to perpetrate a fraud with it.

If your wife wanted to manufacture a quote for one of her stories, she'd be better off just making it up and attributing it to some fictitious source than she would be grabbing a portion from a famous historical speech and attributing it to an actual person. The former is much easier to get away with than the latter.

Well attended events happen every day, I bet 99.9% of the us population have never heard of the Knob Creek machine gun shoot.

LOl

abysmul said:

Well attended events happen every day, I bet 99.9% of the us population have never heard of the Knob Creek machine gun shoot.

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0.1% of the US is still over 300,000 people - some of whom likely watch GMA and/or the ABC evening news and recognize the video.

Anything is possible, but deliberately mischaracterizing something like this would be incredibly stupid because the likelihood of getting caught is practically 100%.

hislegacy said:

ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage appears to come from a Kentucky gun range

ABC aired supposedly shocking footage Monday and Sunday purporting to be from the frontline battle between the Syrian Kurds and the invading Turks. The only problem is, the footage appears to come from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
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Indeed.

I was there last weekend as a representative form the company I work for. Monday everyone was asking me how was Syria.