-By Warner Todd Huston
In its pro-Palestinian coverage of the escalated violence in the Middle East, CNN used faked video footage showing Palestinian “victims” of Israel’s rockets being dragged off the streets.
On his November 15 report, Anderson Cooper hosted a report by CNN correspondent Sara Sidner and during the wind up to her report Cooper played a few video snippets of “victims” being dragged off the streets of the Palestinian held areas.
But one of those “victims” wasn’t a victim at all but was instead a man merely acting injured all for the benefit of western cameras.
Worse, this particular faux victim video is a well-known fake. Breitbart already posted about this “Pallywood” theatrical extravaganza and if we knew about it, how could CNN not have known?
CNN isn’t the only Old Media outlet that falls for fake Palestinian videos. There is, for example, a famous video that caused a contentious court case in France back in 2008. It was a fake video supposedly showing a young Palestinian boy named Muhammad al-Dura being shot at by Israel’s Defense Forces. At first, the video caused international outrage, but in time it was proven to be just Palestinian street theater. No Muhammad al-Dura was ever shot at.
The BBC also has a long history of anti-Israel bias.
How do these fake videos continue to end up in western news coverage? It’s because few western news organizations actually have any news crews on the ground in these affected areas. As it happens, throughout the Mid East western news outlets rely on “stringers” to get video of events. In this case, a stringer is a Palestinian who takes his own video and then sells it to western news agencies. This leaves western news agencies naturally open to faked, Palestinian propaganda. But, the thing is, all these western news agencies know this is happening and they just don’t care.
These faked, “Pallywood” videos will continue to be used by western news organizations because it satisfies their anti-Israel bias.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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