‘During a Pandemic it is essential that the Media gives us real and accurate information…’
UPDATE 3/31/2020: Fox News reports that CBS admitted a “mistake” in including footage from an Italian hospital in a report about the Wuhan virus pandemic in New York City. Not everyone bought that explanation:
Totally understandable. I hate when I mistakenly find a video online that is used within an Italian news story, take the time to download the video onto my computer and then upload and edit it into a news story about New York City.
Happens all the time. https://t.co/c7XEft5vo7— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 31, 2020
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) In an effort to push coronavirus hysteria, CBS News placed a March 22 clip from an Italian hospital into a March 25 report on New York City‘s response to the outbreak, the Gateway Pundit reported.
During a Pandemic it is essential that the Media gives us real and accurate information.
It’s completely irresponsible for @CBSNews to use footage from an Italian Hospital when talking about the outbreak in New York City.
This is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/Essp4uEHle
— ALX ?? (@alx) March 30, 2020
The segment aired after Gov. Andrew Cuomo demanded that the federal government supply 30,000 ventilator machines to the state, which has become one of the global epicenters for the outbreak.
President Donald Trump rebuffed the request, casting doubt upon the outlandish figure, although he since has dispatched General Motors to aid in the production of additional ventilators. New York City alone was likely to surpass 800 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday.
But despite the severity of the crisis, it has been nowhere near the level that anti-Trump media have sought to make it, with the U.S. mortality rate significantly lower than most other affected countries even as greater testing has seen the number of confirmed cases escalate.
In the CBS video report, the narrator ominously says, “New York’s governor says FEMA gave the state 400 ventilators. To that he said this, ‘What am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30,000? You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators.'”
As Cuomo and the narrator speak, the video pans across a crowded hospital, but there’s one problem: the clip is from a Sky News report covering the largest hospital in Bergamo, a city in northern Italy.
“They’re fighting a war here, and they’re losing,” Sky News journalist Stuart Ramsay says in the original clip profiling Italy’s over-worked hospitals. “The sheer numbers of people succumbing to the coronavirus is overwhelming every hospital in northern Italy.”
Watch the CBS News and Sky News videos: