Is a German broadcaster manipulating videos of climate protests or are reactionary journalists capitalising on a technical error?
German journalist Julian Reichelt claims that the regional German public broadcasting company MDR manipulated footage of police removing a climate change protester from a highway.
The scene was part of a video that went viral promoting a documentary about the climate change apocalypse group Letzte Generation.
The short video was the teaser for the documentary Inside Letzte Generation (Inside Last Generation), which the regional public broadcasting company MDR published on May 1st. The short video shows two police officers first speaking with a seated protester, warning him that if he doesn’t clear the street immediately, they will have to remove him using manoeuvres that can be painful, and then lifting him from sitting to standing. He seems to attempt to fall back on the ground and cry in pain as two male police officers carry him away, one officer taking him by the legs and the other by the arms, as he bends over. He says a few words with his head almost touching the ground and one officer then twists the man’s arm behind his back and he screams much more loudly and shrilly, clearly in pain.
This video can also be found on Twitter.
On his own Twitter account, Reichelt shows two videos side by side. In one, the man screams twice, while in the other he screams only once.
“BREAKING: MDR fakes video shared by millions from Last Gen to make it sound like an activist screamed much worse. Simply doubled the audio track to prove “police violence”. Propaganda for compulsory fees!” Reichelt tweeted on May 2nd.
The story was also published on Reichelt’s news site Pleite Ticker on May 2.
The next day, MDR published a statement explaining that the repetition of the scream was due to an unnoticed technical error in that particular video, one of various of the same scene played on different MDR channels.
“A video published on the Instagram channel of MDR-Investigativ went viral the week before last. It showed how a police officer in Berlin removed a representative of the Last Generation from the street at a demonstration, apparently using painful grips. The scene was played out in different versions via different MDR channels. Upon review we found that on a ‘short’ on YouTube we had an unexplainable unfortunate mishap when mixing the audio track which resulted in the audio track being altered,” the statement said.
The story of the two claims was then picked up by Tichys Einblick, which describes itself as “the liberal-conservative expression magazine,” and also by Exxpress.
Both media outlets were critical of the documentary as manipulative in order to exaggerate the actions of the police and paint them as torturing innocent protestors.
The German journalist Stephan Anpalagan had also posted the apparently not doctored video of the scene on his Twitter account on April 21st stating, “That’s assault while on duty. With prior warning. This falls very clearly with the ECHR’s definition of torture.”
It’s a real media circus out there. Enjoy the show.
