CNN stung by fake atrocity video?

posted at 9:15 pm on January 8, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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I saw this segment earlier on CNN and wondered at the time how easily this could have been faked.  Pretty darned easily, as LGF discovered, and the questions start where the fakery seems most obvious:

The story was supposedly that a freelance journalist in Gaza returned home to find his younger brother dead, the victim of a missile attack on a residential rooftop from an unmanned IDF drone. The video shows the supposed scene of the attack, and follows the Gaza family from the hospital to the burial, after a heroic attempt by doctors to revive the young child.

Only, when you look at the supposedly heroic effort, it lacks one thing: any sense that the two doctors are actually performing CPR with any effort at all. They stop as though they’ve scripted out the moment. That’s when I questioned whether the scene could have been faked, and at LGF, a physician called shenanigans:

I’m no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child’s sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can’t make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing chest compressions if you’re not also ventilating the patient somehow. In this video, I can’t tell for sure if the patient has an endotracheal tube in place, but you can see that there is nobody bag-ventilating him (a bag is actually hanging by the head of the bed), and there is no ventilator attached to the patient. In a hospital, during a code on a ventilated patient, somebody would probably be bagging the patient during the chest compressions. And they also would have moved the bed away from the wall, so that somebody could get back there to intubate the patient and/or bag him. In short, the “resuscitation scene” at the beginning is fake, and it’s a pretty lame fake at that.

A little more investigation determined that one of the doctors in the video is notorious terrorist apologist Mads Gilbert. The older brother, meanwhile, is no mere “free-lance cameraman” but the owner of a business that hosts Internet web sites for Hamas. In other words, this looks an awful attempt at propaganda that only a “professional” media outlet with a pre-existing animus to Israel would put on the air without any checking of sources.

CNN has pulled the video from its rotation and its web site, without any explanation or retraction. We’ll see if they own up to their mistake, or simply hope no one notices.

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