CNN’s Staged Video Updates
Israel National News has a pretty fair and complete account of the controversy over that staged hospital room video from Gaza: Bloggers Uncover Possible CNN Video Fraud.
Most of the mainstream media are ignoring the story, of course, because it leads to issues they’d rather not explore—e.g., the ethics of media’s almost universal practice of relying on Palestinian propagandists for their coverage from Gaza.
TIME Magazine’s Andrew Lee Butters brings up the staged video in this piece for their Middle East “Blog,” but it’s a cursory mention bordering on dismissal: Is Israel Losing the Media War in Gaza?
Israel’s decision to keep the Western press out of Gaza may also have backfired, because it’s given a monopoly of coverage to the more inflammatory reporting of Arab satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya that maintain bureaus in Gaza. And while there are many excellent Palestinian journalists working for the Western press in Gaza, there have been some examples of doctored photographs and suspicious looking videos showing civilian suffering. Conservative blogs have singled out one video of doctors trying to resuscitate the brother of the CNN cameraman actually shooting the video, and suggested that it was really a re-enactment.
And so far, not a single mainstream source has mentioned the severe credibility problems of Norwegian terror-supporting doctor, Mads Gilbert.
Frank says: