An ITV documentary highlighting Libyan involvement in arming Provisional IRA fighters during the conflict in the 1980’s showed some pretty sketchy footage of what look like fighters clutching AKs and manning an anti-aircraft cannon while taking out a British helicopter.
The problem? It’s all just footage from Bohemia Interactive’s first-person shooter ARMA II.
Here’s the clip. It’s obvious that it isn’t real life footage, if you play a lot of games.
ITV responded to instant gamer recognition of the footage with this statement:
“The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers. This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise.”
Basically, whether the broadcaster made this ‘mistake’ or not, it’s yet another example of how the media manipulates imagery to suit a purpose. Only the other day I was shown footage of ‘Libyan rebels shelling Gaddafi forces’, featuring a training instructor complete with clipboard. This was actually footage of a rebel training exercise, but was purported to be front-line footage.
Bohemia Interactive CEO Marek Spanel commented on the blunder, outlining his initial bewilderment then amusement to the footage.
“It is very weird to see our game used this way, especially considering the journalists were simply unable to tell difference between reality and game footage and described a short film clearly made using our game Arma II with what they call real IRA footage from 1988,” he said.
“Our games offer great level of freedom to our users to create all kind of things but in this particular case, it is very misleading. At the moment we are gathering further information about the matter but I already had a chance to see the documentary and so far I am not sure how could they make such an obvious mistake.
“On a somewhat more positive note, we consider this as a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games.”
The media has been pulling this kind of stitch-up since TV began, so it’s not surprising that this ‘blunder’ could well be another example of misdirected footage.
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