A smear campaign is currently underway accusing the alternative online media of producing “Fake News”.
Our analysis confirms that the mainstream media are routinely involved in distorting the facts and turning realities upside down.
They are the unspoken architects of “Fake News”.
In this regard, we bring to your attention a GR March 2016 which documents how Belgium’s TV news used “fake videos” in its report of the Brussels terrorist attacks. In fact it was a blogger who discovered that the media had broadcast video footage from a 2011 Moscow airport attack.
A subsequent GR article confirms the use of a fake video in the news coverage of the second bomb attack in the afternoon of March 22 at the Brussels Maelbeek Metro station. The TV report (which was broadcast Worldwide) used video footage from a 2011 terror attack in Minsk, Belarus.
Michel Chossudovsky, November 21, 2016
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Fake Video Used in News Coverage of Brussels Terror Attacks
Brussels News media Dernière Heure at dhnet.be as well as La Libre reported on the terror attacks by providing a CC Camera Airport Surveillance Video of the terror attacks.
The video pertains to a terror attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on 24 January 2011 (posted on youtube in November 2013).
The report of DHnet.be on the Brussels airport attack used the video of the Moscow 2011 attack with the date of the Brussels attack: (22/03/2016) pasted onto the Russian video.
Below is the screenshot of DH’s report.
And the screenshot of La Libre at http://lalibre.be,
And here is a screenshot of the January 2011 terror attack at Moscow’s Domodedova International Airport published on youtube in November 2013 followed by the full youtube video of the Moscow attack:
Was it sloppy journalism or media disinformation? Or profit? Did the Brussels media (mistakenly) rely on a fake video taken from social media or from video archives? The background audio in Russian was suppressed.
The CC camera video recordings at Brussels airport would not normally have been made available to journalists immediately after the attacks.
The video was posted on lalibre.be and dhnet.be at 9.07 am local time; the attacks took place at approximately 8am local time. The video was identified as an airport CC surveillance video. The timely decision to post this video indicating its source (Airport surveillance camera) was taken within less than an hour following the attacks.
Under the auspices of airport security, the video would normally have been made available to police investigators prior to a later decision to making it public.
Update
The official media through an RTL Belgique report acknowledged that the video was fake, pointing to the spreading of rumors on the internet. What the RTL report fails to acknowledge is that the “rumor” was spread by a powerful mainstream media, which produced one of the first documented video reports within an hour of the announcement of the attacks, shortly after 8.00am. In all likelihood, they took it from their archives and inserted it into their report.
Patric Jean on his Blog on the internet (see below) saw the fallacy and accused La Dernière Heure (DH.be), one of Belgium’s largest dailies (in print and online) of deliberately digging up a fake video in its March 22 report 9.07am, –i.e. promoting sensationalism to increase profits. “I could not imagine that the editors of a national daily would cynically publish a fake video of an attack less than an hour after its occurrence”
Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.
