Egyptian TV News Uses Video Game Footage As Proof Of Russian Precision Strikes Against ISIL
from the game-theory dept
Attention news agencies of Planet Earth. This is an all points bulletin for your benefit: stop passing off video game footage as real-life-happenings. Yes, what seems like a thing that shouldn't be able to happen has actually happened several times in the past, from video game footage passed off as a terrorist attack to state news agencies passing off video game footage as a potential threat to a nation's enemies. Some nations appear to even be trying to take advantage of it all, such as when Russia tried to sucker world news groups into thinking that it had found proof that America is arming Ukrainians with video game footage of a weapons cache. And, yet, it keeps happening.The latest case is an Egyptian news agency bizarrely using footage from a Russian-made video game, Apache: Air Assault, published by Activision and featuring english-speaking characters, to proclaim Russian dominance against ISIS in Syria.
Now, I realize there are cultural and linguistic barriers here, but it shouldn't be terribly hard to understand that the voices in that footage are speaking English. And, though video games are becoming more realistic by the day, the footage and audio here is still video-game-ish enough that it's fairly easy to identify it as such with just a few minutes' watching. And yet, anchor Ahmed Moussa had this to say before airing the footage.
"Yes, this is Russia; this is the Russian army. This is Putin," he said. "This is the Russian federation. Are they confronting terrorism? Yes, they are. The Americans were too soft on ISIL. The US has been there for a year and a half, and we have seen not one bullet from them, nor have we seen anyone getting killed by them."I'll give Moussa points for originality. After all, it's not every day you hear lamentations from the Middle East that Americans just aren't killing enough people.
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Filed Under: egypt, footage, isis, news, russia, syria, video games
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Transparency
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the US
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Re: the US
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So what's the deal with Halo?
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"Real" gamers tell me that I shouldn't like them.
Hey, I like mindless G-rated violence and collecting little coiny studs, OK?
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Amateurs...
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now we know why Adam Sandler is their national hero
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Graphics Gap
Ah - you misunderstand the propaganda. This is not Russian propaganda about Russian militiary success - rather it is Russian propaganda that they have now closed the so called "Graphics Gap"*
* When Reagan's SDI (often known as star wars) was being promoted many people noted that the promotional videos demonstrated US superiority in Computer Graphics - if not in actual military hardware.
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Unless you assume that the relationship between English, Arabic, and Hindi is the same as the relationship between Arabic, English, and Russian, I don't see how that's relevant. And that sounds like a tenuous assumption at best. The problem is the only really clear evidence would be from someone who speaks Arabic but not English (or Russian) and we're not likely to get that around here!
To be clear, this is shoddy journalism either way and should be called out. I'm just not convinced it's as brain dead as Tim is making out.
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Very true, and I'd guess the people watching a news show would be the ones more likely to know some English.
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Yes, there's no excuse for them.
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Are you sure this isn't a psyop? Maybe the Russians aren't doing so well. How would we know?
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Yes, i heard it
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Good
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