Wednesday, December 31, 2014

AirAsia Victim Recovery Footage: Real Or Not?


The mainstream media began playing this bizarre video of what is represented as a rescue worker retrieving dead bodies found floating in the Java Sea amidst a debris field supposedly from the missing AirAsia Flight #8501. Internet sleuths think the video is fishy (no pun intended). A floating body shown in the video looks more like one of those cadaver dummies used by rescue workers in practice drills or like those used as props in movies. Some may recall Internet sleuths calling out the media for using video footage of cadaver dummies used in the LAX shooting last year, which you can view on YouTube here and here, just like law enforcement use in their training drills. It's not to say there weren't victims recovered from the sea. What CNN and other media outlets have been caught doing is using stock footage and playing it as if it represents actual events playing out in a current news story.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Drudge had a big photo of it featured on his site yesterday which just screamed fakery.

Anonymous said...

The problem lies with authentication. Reputable news organizations used to pause before running video or photos they receive from third parties, and if they are unable to authenticate, they run a disclaimer saying the news organization received it from a third party and is unable to confirm its authenticity. Once people see something on TV news, they assume it's true. Most of the Middle East conflict videos and images are obtained by a third party, but the major news networks in the U.S. rarely question their authenticity or, at a minimum, put their viewers on notice of the third party sourcing of the information. It's a serious problem that calls into question the legitimacy of much of the news reporting by major news organizations.

Anonymous said...

Bodies that have been soaking in water become grossly disfigured and unrecognizable. With that said, I have no doubt that this airliner went down and the passenger families are going through a sense of loss that cannot be imaginable.

Not everything is fake. There is real tragedy suck as bombs, airplane accidents, etc...