By Madison Ruppert
As the United Nations has finally acknowledged the fact that established terrorist groups are behind the bombings in Syria, the state-funded BBC has been busted using an image from Iraq in 2003 to accompany a story about the alleged massacre of children in Syria.
I’m not one to completely discount the possibility that this could have been a wholly innocent slip-up, given the fact that the Western media in general has blindly accepted anything so-called activists report as fact without any verification whatsoever, while discounting everything the Syrian government says no matter how much evidence they might have to back it up.
However, the individual who took the photograph, a Getty photojournalist named Marco di Lauro, does not apparently think it is innocent, saying, “Someone is using someone else’s picture for propaganda on purpose.”
Di Lauro nearly “fell off his chair,” according to the British Telegraph, when he saw the image.
Di Lauro stated that he wasn’t angered by the usage of his photograph, but instead he was “astonished” by the massive failure of the BBC to even do a cursory check of their sources.
The image was actually taken all the way back on March 27, 2003 and shows a quite disturbing scene of an Iraqi child jumping over a massive number of white body bags containing skeletons discovered in a desert to the south of Baghdad.
Earlier today, this image accompanied an article with the headline “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows,” with the caption stating that the image was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified.
However, this disclaimer did not stop them from saying that it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial.”
It is up to the reader to decide if they would like to believe that the BBC is actually so wildly incompetent and careless to not even bother doing a simple internet search to check their sources, or if perhaps the BBC chose to post it without checking knowing the significant emotional impact it would have on viewers.
Unsurprisingly, when their egregious mistake – if it truly was a purely innocent mistake – was exposed, they quickly removed the image.
“I went home at 3am and I opened the BBC paid which had a front page story about what happened in Syria and I almost felt [sic] off from [sic] my chair,” di Lauro said.
“One of my pictures from Iraq was used by the BBC web site as a front page illustration claiming that those were the bodies of yesterday’s massacre in Syria and that the picture was sent by an activist,” he added.
“The picture was taken by me and it’s on my web site, on the feature section regarding a story I did in Iraq during the war called Iraq, the aftermath of Saddam,” di Lauro explained.
“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it [sic] by anyone: activist citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all,” di Lauro added.
He said that he wasn’t so much concerned about receiving an apology or even that the BBC used the image without his consent.
“What’s amazing it’s that [sic] a news organization has a picture proving a massacre that happened yesterday in Syria and instead it’s a picture that was taken in 2003 of a totally different massacre,” di Lauro said.
In an attempt to explain away the massive error, a BBC spokesman said, “We were aware of this image being widely circulated on the internet in the early hours of this morning following the most recent atrocities in Syria.”
“We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently verified,” the spokesman added.
However, this excuse is far from adequate. Consider the fact that the numbers commonly referred to when the Western media refers to the death toll in Syria have never been independently verified and are from these same, unreliable “activist” sources.
Does that stop so-called news agencies from parroting these numbers day in and day out in an attempt to drill them into the public’s consciousness? No, not one bit.
“Efforts were made overnight to track down the original source of the image and when it was established the picture was inaccurate we removed it immediately,” the spokesman said.
Unfortunately this type of “mistake” happens quite often, especially in the West’s propaganda efforts targeting unfriendly governments in the Middle East.
Consider the case last year when a video was widely circulated supposedly showing atrocities which was actually a video taken by a shop owner in Iraq. The individual who originally took the footage quickly spoke out when he saw it being used as supposed evidence of atrocities.
As previously mentioned, this is just a symptom of the West’s insistence on trusting anything and everything coming from so-called activists, human rights groups, and others in the opposition with little to no verification.
This was seen time and time again in Libya where the rebels would simply fabricate events and then pass them on to their media contacts that would run with the story as if it was true.
Hilariously, some rebels even admitted that they were completely manufacturing news stories for political purposes. Yet somehow the media would continue to regard these sources as credible, which is nothing short of absurd.
Hopefully this latest incident forces the Western media to be at least a tiny bit more hesitant in giving credence to unverified reports. Unfortunately I suspect that this will not be the case.
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