Do you notice anything wrong with the video below? It was available on the CNN website a few days ago and shows footage from the riots that took place on July 29 in Belgrade during the Serbian Radical Party meeting in support of Radovan Karadžic.
If you have ever visited Belgrade, you should be able to spot some rather unfamiliar things in that video. CNN has mixed in footage of riots that took place in Budapest, Hungary, with that of the riots in Belgrade. "Surely, this is a simple mistake by the editing team," I hear you cry. Well, someone must have been pretty incompetent to mix in footage from over one year ago!
If you look carefully, during the first 19 seconds you can see/hear:
If you look carefully, during the first 19 seconds you can see/hear:
- Hungarian police officers
- Hungarian flags
- Cars on fire (no cars were torched in the Belgrade riot)
- The Hungarian language
- Hungarian license plates
- Water cannons to disperse protesters (that didn't happen either in Belgrade)
Then we are shown real footage of what actually happened in Belgrade on Tuesday. That's all good then, but during the last 12 seconds you can see:
- that suddenly Belgrade has acquired a metro system (wouldn't that be lovely?)
Okay, so what on earth's going on here? It's not as if there was a lack of footage from the Belgrade riots that CNN felt they needed to pad out their report with some other footage (which is not exactly a credible practice for a worldwide news outlet, is it?), Some comments on the web seem to hint that perhaps CNN were deliberately trying to make the protests seem more violent than they actually were - I don't really believe that, but still, how does somebody accidentally edit in footage from an entirely different country and which was filmed over one year ago?
It does leave you thinking whether you can actually trust what you see on CNN or indeed any other news outlet. The fact that CNN has yet to give any official statement on the matter just adds further to the mystery. What do you think?
Here's some quite lengthy 'as it happened' footage of the riots on Tuesday - perhaps somebody could forward it on to the CNN news team?
It does leave you thinking whether you can actually trust what you see on CNN or indeed any other news outlet. The fact that CNN has yet to give any official statement on the matter just adds further to the mystery. What do you think?
Here's some quite lengthy 'as it happened' footage of the riots on Tuesday - perhaps somebody could forward it on to the CNN news team?
6 comments:
well adam !
you will be next director of CNN!
lina
...
My grandmother was all worried about me coming to Belgrade. When I told her not to believe everything she watches on the telly, she thought I was saying so to not worry her...
Yes, a friend of mine had many friends and family members call her before she came to Belgrade (the day after the US Embassy burning riots in March), telling her to reconsider because Serbia wasn't safe.
It does seem that whenever a riot or disturbance happens in a local area (a town or a city), then the whole of Serbia is unsafe.
I'm sure if she had been going to London or Paris, and there had been a riot, people would not have overreacted to the same degree.
Adam
Wow, Adam! (Thanks too for visiting my blog today!)
This is certainly mind-blowing, though having lived here for so long and seen what the "informed media" showed in particular during the NATO bombing, I have never had any doubts that I will ever fully trust any news source anymore.
Great stuff, Adam. We've posted this note on our blog (with credit going to you), to go along with our previous post on CNN faking its transcripts as well. Keep up the great work.
- www.MediaSlackers.com
well done adam!!!
i wanted to go to belgrade again asap..
i wanted to know how that wonderful city looks with a metro..:-)
dne in so little time..;-)
p.s. as read on a sarajevo wall:
"the first casualty in war is the truth"
alf
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