ABC News appears to have committed a grave error twice this week for which it has yet to issue a single on-air correction.
On Sunday, the network’s flagship evening news program, World News Tonight, aired footage that anchor Tom Llamas claimed showed the Turkish army bombing Kurdish civilians in northern Syria. The footage was actually from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at a gun range in Kentucky. The next day, Good Morning America aired the same footage, claiming again that it showed the fighting in Syria between the Turks and the Kurds.
As of this writing, neither World News Tonight nor Good Morning America has issued a correction on air for what appears to be a massive, glaring blunder for one of America’s biggest and most powerful television networks. A representative for the network did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s inquiries about how the Kentucky footage made it to air or why the news programs that reported the apparent falsehood have not yet acknowledged it.
The closest ABC has come to admitting error is when it provided the Washington Examiner with a statement Monday acknowledging that it no longer stands by its earlier reporting.
“We’ve taken down video that aired on World News Tonight Sunday and Good Morning America this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy,” said the network’s representative. “ABC News regrets the error.”
That is a good first step, but the programs responsible for circulating the false information are responsible also for circulating corrections. There is no good reason why these shows have not yet addressed the issue.
World News Tonight did not broach the subject Monday evening even though the network had already pulled down the Kentucky gun range video. As for Good Morning America … well, the hosts talked about everything Tuesday morning but the apparent footage flub.
The hosts talked about Hunter Biden, U.S. sanctions against Turkey, a police shooting, a car crash, the “growing crisis in Syria,” an earthquake, the Green Bay Packers’ last-minute win against the Detroit Lions, more Hunter Biden, LeBron James, a child who is now cancer-free, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lupita Nyong’o, Hunter Biden again, Prince William, Tuesday’s upcoming Democratic debate, Adam Rippon, and chocolate chip cookies.
There was no mention anywhere during the two-hour show of the since-pulled footage or when senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell claimed during Monday’s Good Morning America broadcast that the Kentucky video “appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tell Abyad.”
Pannell even appeared again on the same program Tuesday morning to give an update on the situation in Syria (or maybe Kentucky?), and the hosts still made no mention of the faulty footage they showed they day before.
