Online Journalism News

Iraq killing video story re-surfaces in mainstream press

Posted: 10/05/04 By: Jemima Kiss
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The British mainstream press last week finally caught up with a story that has been common currency on the web for months.

The story, concerning graphic video footage taken from the gun camera of a US Apache helicopter on active duty in Iraq and showing the killing of suspected Iraqi insurgents, first came to light in January when the tape was broadcast on ABC News.

An MPEG file of the footage was then widely distributed on the internet, as reported in dotJournalism on 14 January.

Writing in the Independent on 6 May, Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk described the footage and claimed that several European TV stations had decided not to show the video "on the grounds that the pictures were too terrible to show".

The story was also covered by London newspaper Metro; both pieces were prompted by the broadcast last week of the video by CanalPlus in France. This in itself was reported by the news agency AFP.

In fact, as was also reported in dotJournalism, the clip had been broadcast in Europe on German television as early as February (as anyone who had taken the trouble to conduct a 30-second search on the internet could have discovered).

We originally reported the story as an example of how viral news appears to be bypassing the mainstream media. Now that the printed press appears to have caught up, at least insofar as to report the existence of the tape and its graphic nature, we await the real story - just who released this tape and why?

Watch the Apache MPEG:
Warning: some viewers may find the content distressing. (4.7mb download)
http://cop-players.com/cop-media/apache.mpeg

Full length Apache video:
http://www.vampirebat.com/war/Apache%20Kills%20in%20Iraq.mpeg

More Apache stories:
/news/story795.shtml
/news/story823.shtml

See also:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=518612 (subscription required)
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/apache_video_040109.html
http://www.ndrtv.de/panorama/archiv/2004/0226/soldaten.html

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.