Claim: CNN used old footage to fake images of 'Palestinians dancing in the street' after the terrorist attack on the USA.

Status: False.

Origins: Cutting straight to the chase, no, CNN did not air decade-old footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video used on CNN was in fact shot on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in East Jerusalem by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91 -- a fact proved by its inclusion of comments from a Palestinian praising Osama Bin Laden, whose name was unlikely to have come up ten years earlier in connection with the invasion and liberation of Kuwait. As well, the person who made the claim quoted above has since recanted. The footage was real. It's a shame, in fact, that its provenance was doubted because the lives of journalists who have attempted to capture similar acts on video have been threatened. That this tape made it out at all is a miracle. Yet even if the footage had been recycled from an earlier time, we have to ask why there would have been an uproar over it. Credible journalists were on hand and were observing the celebrations. If they hadn't been able to make video recordings to display as a backdrop to their reports, would harm have been done if stock footage were run instead, footage that would give the viewing audience a far better idea of the feel of events than a flat voice-only report would have? News shows continually make use of stock film clips when the images called for by the piece are so mundane it would be foolish to send a news team to film fresh shots. No one needs to film that particular day's herd of tourists entering the White House when stock footage of other tourists doing exactly that is sitting in a newsroom's archive and can be run as a backdrop to a reporter's piece on a Whitehouse-related story. Likewise, stock footage can be used when actual footage is impossible to come by. The primary issue should not really be whether older video footage was used to represent a current event, but whether the news of event was reported accurately. That is, was it correct to report that at least some Palestinians were "celebrating" the news that terrorist attacks had been made against the United States of America?

Certainly CNN wasn't the only news organization to report that information, as other outlets such as Reuters and the Los Angeles Times carried the same story.

Also, other news outlets such as Fox News and The Jerusalem Post reported that journalists were threatened for capturing images of Palestinian celebrations, making real footage of the event harder to obtain [...]

http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/outrage/cnn.htm

-- Rich Marsh (marshr@airmail.net), September 20, 2001

Answers

Never Mind

Mario A.V. Carvalho, the Brazilian student who started the rumor that CNN had used old footage of celebrating Palestinians, has recanted the claim, which he says was based on "information given to me by a teacher": "I spent the last day looking for that teacher, and, unfortunately, when I found her, she DENIED having access to such images. She said that she was sure she had seen the images back in 1991, but SHE CAN'T PROVE. She was not willing to provide further information, DENYING what she had said before to a full class of students. I sincerely apologize for this uncertain information; unfortunately I can't prove the information contained in my last post; IT'S ONLY A CONJECTURE, THAT THOSE IMAGES OF PALESTINIANS CELEBRATING IS FALSE. I bought the idea myself, and reproduced it for you because of the importance of it, in the case it was to be confirmed."

[http://uk.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=11546]

-- Rich Marsh (marshr@airmail.net), September 21, 2001.