The answer to an earlier puzzle...
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X-Author: Declan McCullagh is at http://www.mccullagh.org/
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[I've received probably dozens of forwarded email messages, each
spreading the same urban legend and falsely claiming CNN aired file
footage. Time to kill this lie before it spreads any further. --DBM]
---
http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/outrage/cnn.htm
Claim: CNN used old footage to fake images of 'Palestinians dancing
in the street' after the terrorist attack on the USA.
Status: False.
Origins: Cutting straight to the chase, no, CNN did not air
decade-old footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Eason
Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video used on
CNN was in fact shot on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in East Jerusalem
by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91
-- a fact proved by its inclusion of comments from a Palestinian
praising Osama Bin Laden, whose name was unlikely to have come up ten
years earlier in connection with the invasion and liberation of
Kuwait. As well, the person who made the claim quoted above has since
recanted.
The footage was real. It's a shame, in fact, that its provenance was
doubted because the lives of journalists who have attempted to capture
similar acts on video have been threatened. That this tape made it out
at all is a miracle.
Yet even if the footage had been recycled from an earlier time, we
have to ask why there would have been an uproar over it. Credible
journalists were on hand and were observing the celebrations. If they
hadn't been able to make video recordings to display as a backdrop to
their reports, would harm have been done if stock footage were run
instead, footage that would give the viewing audience a far better
idea of the feel of events than a flat voice-only report would have?
News shows continually make use of stock film clips when the images
called for by the piece are so mundane it would be foolish to send a
news team to film fresh shots. No one needs to film that particular
day's herd of tourists entering the White House when stock footage of
other tourists doing exactly that is sitting in a newsroom's archive
and can be run as a backdrop to a reporter's piece on a
Whitehouse-related story. Likewise, stock footage can be used when
actual footage is impossible to come by.
The primary issue should not really be whether older video footage was
used to represent a current event, but whether the news of event was
reported accurately. That is, was it correct to report that at least
some Palestinians were "celebrating" the news that terrorist attacks
had been made against the United States of America? Certainly CNN
wasn't the only news organization to report that information, as other
outlets such as Reuters and the Los Angeles Times carried the same
story. Also, other news outlets such as Fox News and The Jerusalem
Post reported that journalists were threatened for capturing images of
Palestinian celebrations, making real footage of the event harder to
obtain [...]
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Dr David Wood
Earl Grey Postdoctoral Research Fellow
"The Evolution of Algorithmic Surveillance
and the Potential for Social Exclusion"
Centre for Urban Technology
School of Architecture, PLanning and Landscape
University Of Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
UK
Tel: wk tbc; 01207 560026 (home)
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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