Are you distrustful of the coverage of what is happening now in northern Syria between the Kurds and the Turkish army? You have good reason to be. ABC aired supposedly shocking footage Monday and Sunday purporting to be from the frontline battle between the Syrian Kurds and the invading Turks. The only problem is, the footage appears to come from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
After seeing a comment from Twitter user Wojciech Pawelczyk, I began making some calls. As of this writing, it appears ABC indeed aired footage recorded in the Bluegrass State and claimed it was from Syria. The network has since pulled the video.
"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," a network representative told the Washington Examiner. "ABC News regrets the error."
A representative for the Knob Creek Gun Range also told the Washington Examiner that they are still investigating ABC’s reporting, adding further that the images aired by the network "look to be" from their Kentucky property.
"As of right now," the representative said, "it seems to be our footage."
Note that the sequence and shape of explosions is identical in the following ABC and Kentucky videos, as are some of the features of the terrain amid the explosions. But we might actually be dealing with two different videos of the same Kentucky live-fire event from slightly different angles. In the independent film of the live-fire event in Kentucky, you can clearly see taller objects in the foreground that seem to appear as silhouettes in the ABC footage:
Video: https://youtu.be/BuO6yJrRAYw
“This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tal Abyad,” senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell, who is in Syria, said Monday on Good Morning America.
As he spoke, ABC aired footage showing undisclosed gunmen firing tracer bullets at undisclosed targets, causing massive, fiery explosions. Furious stuff indeed.
Earlier, on Sunday, ABC News anchor Tom Llamas also aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians.
“The situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria. One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State],” he said.
Llamas then described the video as it aired on-screen.
“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies,” he added.
The intro to the show he anchored, ABC World News Tonight, also claimed of the footage: “A border town, bombarded by Turkey’s military!”
The images would indeed be stunning were they actually from northern Syria. It would be horrific if the images showed a Turkish assault on Kurdish civilians. But the images do not show that. The footage, which appears to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for an American audience. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which includes the very popular night shoot, is a biannual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they often record it and post video of it to social media.
Videos such as this:
https://youtu.be/bNtj0gyJYrA
And this:
https://youtu.be/1uUNL6rW-Ck And this:
https://youtu.be/BrH8bClnlzQ
It is astonishing that ABC appears to have inserted Kentucky gun range footage into its prime-time news segments on the clashes in Syria and that no one at the network — not a producer, not a fact-checker, and certainly not an on-air personality — caught the errors before they aired.
