France 2 Apologizes for Using Phony Gaza Attack Video

Media | Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 5:15:39 pm PST

France’s public TV station France 2 (perpetrator of the Mohammed Al-Dura hoax) was taken in by that footage from an accidental explosion of a truck full of rockets at a Hamas rally, and yesterday they retracted their report and apologized: French TV apologises over footage mix-up.

PARIS: France’s public broadcaster was forced to apologise to viewers yesterday after it mistakenly used amateur footage shot in 2005 to illustrate a report on the current Gaza conflict.

France 2 television on Monday broadcast part of an amateur video presented in a voiceover commentary as showing the fallout from an Israeli air strike on a civilian area in Gaza on January 1.

Dating from September 2005, the video, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, actually shows civilians wounded in the accidental explosion of a pick-up truck loaded with Hamas rockets at a rally in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Alerted by the French website LePost.fr, France 2 admitted its mistake yesterday and made a formal apology to viewers in its midday news broadcast.

“It is an error on our behalf. There was an internal malfunction in the checking of information,” a France 2 executive told AFP.

The France 2 article (in French) is here: Vidéo intox de Gaza sur France 2: ‘Ça a gueulé dans la rédaction’.

All over the world, the mainstream media is suffering from these kinds of “internal malfunctions in the checking of information.”

(Hat tip: zombie.)