I just did a spot for PJTV on that staged video from a Gaza hospital, and some questions that came up:

Why hasn’t CNN made any kind of statement about this? They yanked the video from the page where it was posted, so obviously they know there’s a problem. Are they just hoping the whole thing will blow over, and counting on the rest of the media to let it?

Whatever happened to the idea that news organizations should correct, admit, and take responsibility for errors? Is CNN more worried about the political fallout, or the loss of access to Gaza, than they are about their credibility?

Again, here’s the page where the video was posted; there’s no explanation or retraction for promoting what is almost certainly pure Hamas propaganda: Toll of conflict strikes home as cameraman finds brother dead - CNN.com.

They may have removed the video player from their page, but the video itself still resides on a CNN server, and I saved the link. Here’s the video, playing from a publicly available URL on a CNN server:

UPDATE at 1/9/09 3:05:27 pm:

The Daily Kos Kiddies jump up to defend this propaganda, even after CNN has pulled the video offline (gotta love it): Daily Kos: LGF, Michelle Malkin ran a story on a ‘faked video’.

My question to you is, how callous do these people have to be to assume that the boy is not dead and claim that the video is a forgery? Even if the video was staged after the fact, how could they be sure that the boy was not actually dead?

I never claimed the boy wasn’t dead. I don’t think there’s clear evidence on that either way; but in the original post LGF reader “Last Mohican” argued that there wouldn’t have been any reason to fake the CPR compression in such a delicate way if he were actually dead. That has since been confirmed to me both at LGF and in half a dozen emails from doctors and EMT folks, some going into great detail—and that is far from the only thing wrong with the scene.

If the boy was actually killed, that’s a terrible thing and I certainly don’t enjoy seeing children die.

But if Mahmoud really was a victim of the violence in Gaza, it’s despicable (not to mention highly unethical) to pose and stage a scene with his body like this. Ghoulish. Obscene. The kind of thing terrorists do.

A point that never occurs to the Daily Kos hivemind.