With the headline "Slaughter in Syria," ABC aired footage of what it said was a Turkish attack on a Syrian border town on Sunday and Monday. One problem: The video was actually of a popular military gun demonstration in Kentucky, Mediaite reports. ABC apologized after the video was shown on World News Tonight Sunday and Monday's edition of Good Morning America. The network said it "regrets the error" and it pulled the footage as soon as "questions were raised about its accuracy." It did not explain how the error occurred. The footage from the night shoot at the Knob Creek Gun Range was uploaded to YouTube in 2017. It's not clear whether it was edited before ABC aired it.
Claire Wardle at First Draft, an organization that works to counter disinformation online, tells the New York Times that search tools would make such an embarrassing error "relatively easy" to avoid. She says that on a Sunday, "when they were probably stretched for staff, they failed to do the necessary verification checks." President Trump called it a "big scandal," though he quickly pivoted from Syria to the Bidens. "They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace," the president tweeted. "Tomorrow they will ask softball questions to Sleepy Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, like why did Ukraine & China pay you millions when you knew nothing? Payoff?" (More ABC News stories.)
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