One of Germany’s largest public-service—that is, taxpayer-funded—television broadcasters has been forced to release a grovelling apology after airing phoney videos, though not before attempting to downplay the scandal.
ZDF’s flagship Heute Journal news programme broadcast a report on Sunday evening on migration enforcement operations in the U.S.—a highly sensitive issue, not least following the deadly shooting of an American citizen by immigration and customs officers last month.
The report included what appeared to be footage of a mother and her children being led away by an immigration officer. The clip was later confirmed to have been generated using artificial intelligence.
A second sequence, showing an officer leading a boy away, was in fact filmed in 2022 following a school shooting threat in Florida.
ZDF’s own editorial guidelines prohibit the use of AI-generated images depicting real people, events, or political contexts in news reporting, except in stories explicitly about AI manipulation. The broadcaster later acknowledged that this standard had not been met.
In her introduction to the segment, presenter Dunja Hayali told viewers that while many videos circulating online about immigration raids were real, “not all are.” The programme then proceeded to air a clip that was itself fabricated.
The ZDF channel has recently been used as a platform by senior establishment officials to call for tougher regulations on media outlets that do not align with their worldview. Yet author and historian Rainer Zitelmann said on Wednesday that without these smaller, opposition publications, “ZDF would have gotten away with the manipulation.”
Medien wie Apollo, OERR Blog und Nius haben wiederum Wirkung gezeigt. Ohne sie wäre das ZDF mit der Manipulation durchgekommen. Glückwunsch!! pic.twitter.com/XmSxw1buFW
On Tuesday evening, ZDF deputy editor-in-chief Anne Gellinek accepted that the channel had made “a double error, which we are now carefully investigating and which is particularly painful because we at ZDF News invest a great deal of effort in providing you with verified information.”
As head of ZDF News, I expressly apologize to you, our viewers, for this.
But Junge Freiheitcriticised the station for initially only stating that—as the paper put it—“it would suffice to correct the error on the broadcaster’s corrections page.”
Deputy leader of the liberal FDP party Wolfgang Kubicki also described ZDF’s misleading of millions of viewers as “a media scandal that will continue to occupy us for a long time to come.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
