Claim: CNN used old
footage to fake images of 'Palestinians dancing in the street' after the
terrorist attack on the USA.
Status:
False.
Example:
[Collected on the Internet,
2001]
All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news
distributors, and one of them - as you well know - is CNN. Very
well, I guess all of you have been seeing (just as I've been)
images from this company. In particular, one set of images called
my attencion: the Palestinians celebrating the bombing, out on the
streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera.
Well, THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of
Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait! It's simply
unacceptable that a super-power of cumminications as CNN uses
images which do not correspond to the reality in talking about so
serious an issue. A teacher of mine, here in Brazil, has
videotapes recorded in 1991, with the very same images; he's been
sending emails to CNN, Globo (the major TV network in Brazil) and
newspapers, denouncing what I myself classify as a crime against
the public opinion. If anyone of you has access to this kind of
files, serch for it. In the meanwhile, I'll try to 'put my hands'
on a copy of this tape.
But now, think for a moment about the impact of such mages.
Your people is hurt, emotionally fragile, and this kind broadcast
have very high possibility of causing waves of anger and rage
against Palestinians. It's simply irresponsible to show images
such as those. Finally, I'd like to say that we all regret and
condemn all that has happened in the last days; but Nikos has a
point here. I really don't want to be misunderstood here, but the
truth is that US government had shown no respect for other
countries in the last decades. In the 60s and 70s they had halped
lots of military coups throughout the world (including Brazil in
64). Later, with Reagan and Bush Father, the Washington Consensus
have been demolishing the bases of our economies, making us more
and more dependant (and, many of us, prehocupied with this
situation).
Your current president quickly made things worse: Kioto
Protocol, Star Wars, Colombia Plan, the exchange of rain forest
for pieces of external debt, tha abandonment of the position of
third party in negotiations between IRA and England, and between
Palestinians and Israel. All those mistakes in US external
politics made your country more hatred than before, and, of
course, more vulnerable.
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Origins:
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 as the appearance in the video
of post-1991 automobiles. The person who made the claim quoted above has
since
recanted.
(The argument that the footage CNN used could not possibly be real
because it showed Palestinians in broad daylight not long after the attack
-- even though Palestinian territory is several time zones
ahead of New York -- is not valid. Eastern Daylight Time in
the United States is six hours behind the area of the Middle East referred
to as Palestine. Thus, when the first attack occurred in New York just
before 9:00 A.M., Palestine time would have been 3:00
P.M., and the area would still have been bathed in plenty of
mid-afternoon sunlight.)
Reuters, the international news agency whose camera crew shot the
footage, issued the following
statement:
Reuters rejects as utterly baseless an allegation being circulated
by e-mail and the Internet claiming that it circulated 10-year-old
videotape to illustrate Palestinians celebrating in the wake of
the September 11 tragedies in the United States.
Reuters welcomes a statement by the Universidad Estatal de
Campinas-Brasil (UNICAMP), one of whose students was the author of
the original e-mail, setting the record straight.
The videotape in question was shot in East Jerusalem by a
Reuters camera crew on September 11 in the immediate aftermath of
the attacks on the United States. The footage was broadcast by CNN
and other subscribers to the Reuters video news service.
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statement:
There is absolutely no truth to the information that is now
distributed on the Internet that CNN used 10-year-old video when
showing the celebrating of some Palestinians in East Jerusalem
after the terror attacks in the U.S. The video was shot that day
by a Reuters camera crew. CNN is a client of Reuters and like
other clients, received the video and broadcast it. Reuters
officials have publicly made the facts clear as well.
The allegation is false. The source of the allegation has
withdrawn it and apologized. It was started by a Brazilian student
who now says he immediately posted a correction once he knew the
information was not true. This is the statement by his university
-- UNICAMP -- Universidad Estatal de
Campinas-Brasil.
OFFICIAL STATEMENT by Universidad de Campinas-Brasil
17/09/01
UNICAMP (Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil) would like to
announce that it has no knowledge of a videotape from 1991, whose
images supposedly aired on CNN showing Palestinians celebrating
the terrorist attacks in the U.S. The tape was supposedly from
1991, and there were rumors that the images were passed off as
current.
This information was later denied, as soon as it proved false,
by Márcio A. V. Carvalho, a student at UNICAMP. He approached the
administration today, 17.09.2001, to clarify the following:
- the information he got, verbally, was that a professor from
another institution (not from UNICAMP) had the tape;
- he sent the information to a discussion group e-mail list;
- many people from this list were interested in the subject
and requested more details;
- he again contacted the person who first gave him the
information and the person denied having the tape;
- the student immediately sent out a note clarifying what
happened to the people from his e-mail list.
The original message, however, was distributed all over the
world, often with many distortions, including a falsified by-line
article from the student. He affirms that a hacker attacked his
domain. Several E-mails have been sent on his behalf and those
dating from 15.09.2001 should be ignored.
Among the distortions is the fact that UNICAMP would be
analyzing the tape, which is absolutely false. The administration
considers this alert definitive and will be careful to avoid new
rumors.
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Certainly CNN wasn't the only news organization to report on the
reaction of some Palestinians to the events of September 11,
as other outlets such as
Reuters and the
Los Angeles Times carried the same story. Also, other news outlets
such as
and
The Jerusalem Post reported that journalists were threatened
for capturing images of Palestinian celebrations, making real footage of
the event harder to obtain:
Palestinian Authority actions to confiscate film footage of
Palestinians celebrating the terror attacks on the US were logical
to prevent the media from painting the wrong picture of
Palestinian sentiment, Bassam Abu Sharif, an adviser to PA
Chairman Yasser Arafat.
"This was a normal preventive act . . . we don't want to give
more to the Zionist propaganda which portrays all Palestinians as
terrorists," he said. "The idea is that these people were not
allowed to film, because a small group of people on film would
represent the Palestinian people as a whole."
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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. But CNN's reputation was besmirched by a single person,
a Brazilian student who reported (without verification) that the footage
in question actually came from a 1991 report on "Palestinians celebrating
the invasion of Kuwait," a copy of which was in the possession of one of
his teachers. (Actually, the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq took place in
1990, and it's unlikely anyone captured images of Palestinians
"celebrating" that event. If CNN had used similar footage, it probably
came from the Palestinian reaction to Iraq's launching of missiles at
Israel during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.)
Subsequent rumors that the "Israeli Defense Agency" sent a film crew to
hand out candy to Palestinians in order to induce them into staging a
"celebration" for the cameras appear to be equally unfounded. However,
this issue does emphasize a point that appears to have been
overlooked in the debate over whether video was re-used from a previous
year or not: that images themselves are not the whole story. A news report
can be accompanied by stock footage and still be fair and accurate, but a
news report accompanied by current footage is not necessarily either fair
or accurate. A simple news clip doesn't always provide us with
enough context to discern what the people depicted in it are
reacting to, why they're reacting the way they are, or whether
their actions are representative of a large group of people or a very
small one, as an Italian journalist in Beirut reported:
Trying to find our bearings, my husband and I went into an
American-style cafe in the Hamra district, near Rue Verdun, rated
as one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world. Here
the cognitive dissonance was immediate, and direct. The café's
sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and
making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody
looked shocked, or moved. They were excited, very excited.
An hour later, at a little market near the U.S. Embassy, on the
outskirts of Beirut, a thrilled shop assistant showed us, using
his hands, how the plane had crashed into the twin towers. He,
too, was laughing.
Once back at the house where we were staying, we started
scanning the international channels. Soon came reports of
Palestinians celebrating. The BBC reporter in Jerusalem said it
was only a tiny minority. Astonished, we asked some moderate Arabs
if that was the case. "Nonsense," said one, speaking for many.
"Ninety percent of the Arab world believes that Americans got what
they deserved."
An exaggeration? Rather an understatement. A couple of days
later, we headed north to Tripoli, near the Syrian border. On the
way, we read that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who donated
blood in front of the cameras, was rejecting any suggestion that
his people were rejoicing over the terrorist attack. "It was less
than 10 children in Jerusalem," he said.
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Last
updated: 23 September 2001
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