A full work week has now elapsed since ABC News made a remarkable error. We still have no explanation of how it happened.
ABC anchor Tom Llamas claimed Sunday evening during a broadcast of World News Tonight that footage aired by the network showed the horrific results of President Trump ordering U.S. forces out of northern Syria “effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State].” On Monday, Good Morning America aired the same footage. ABC senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell claimed it showed “the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad.”
None of this appears to be true.
A representative for the Knob Creek Gun Range told the Washington Examiner Monday that the images aired by ABC “look to be” from their Kentucky property. “As of right now,” the person said, “it seems to be our footage.” An ABC representative said separately in a statement to the Washington Examiner: “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. ABC News regrets the error.”
I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but this is a big deal. This is not a little mix-up; like a local news station playing the wrong B-roll footage during a segment on the county fair. One of the largest and most powerful news networks in the United States this week aired footage from a Kentucky gun range and claimed it came from Syria, asserting all the while that the White House was directly responsible for the supposed carnage.
If intentional, ABC’s footage scandal represents an evil and devious attempt by a major newsroom to use deception to influence American foreign policy. If by accident, the video scandal has different but equally serious implications for ABC and the American press as a whole.
A source told Snopes this week that the video came to the network by way of an individual who claimed to be in a “sensitive position” on the Turkish-Syrian border. My Washington Examiner colleague Jerry Dunleavy reported elsewhere that it is possible that the Kentucky footage may have come to the attention of ABC via notorious “social media troll” İbrahim Melih Gökçek, “a Turkish politician in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s governing Justice and Development.” Gökçek posted a touched-up version of the Kentucky video to his Twitter account on Oct. 9 with the caption, “How much of the ammunition the U.S. had given to the YPG, would you say, was destroyed in one go?”
Which is to say, it is possible that ABC was tricked into thinking the footage was genuine. If true, you should be worried about just how susceptible American news networks are to foreign propaganda and deception. If ABC was tricked into thinking this Kentucky tape was the real deal from Syria, what else has the network been tricked into reporting? What else could it be tricked into reporting?
The network needs to answer for this. It cannot go on pretending as if this did not happen.
How did this Kentucky tape go to air? What channels did it go through at ABC? Who fact-checked it? It is impossible to tell from the tape who is doing the shooting and what is being targeted, so who told ABC it was the Turks bombing the Kurds? Most importantly, what assurances can ABC give that something like this will not happen again?
ABC’s viewers deserve an explanation; something a lot more thorough and detailed than a simple “we regret the error.” At a time when trust in the press is already at historic lows, the network can do at least that much.
