BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
WHITE HOUSE IN FAKE VIDEO FURORE
BuzzFeed News did its own analysis of the video. BuzzFeed reporter, Charlie Warzel, concluded in his article, Welcome To The Dystopia: People Are Arguing About Whether This Trump Press Conference Video Is Doctored: “While it’s not technically ‘sped up’ by intent, it effectively is in practice. The video-to- GIF conversion removes frames from the source material by reducing the frame rate. The GIF-making tool, GIF Brewery, for example, typically reduces source video to ten frames per second. Raw, televised video typically has a frame rate of 29.97 frames per second. When frames drop out, the video appears jumpier. Acosta’s arm seems to move faster.” Mock YouTube videos followed, one of which included Jim Acosta’s karate chop
Last month, the White House revoked the press credentials of CNN journalist Jim Acosta after a heated exchange with President Donald Trump. The reason given for the revocation was “disrupting press proceedings”. This was followed by assertions that Acosta had “karate chopped” an intern after declining to give up a hand-held microphone to her. The White House press team pointed the public to a video purporting to show the ‘chop’ up close. The video was sourced from Paul Joseph Watson, a British YouTuber and correspondent for conspiracy-centric news site, InfoWars. A furore erupted over whether the video had been digitally manipulated, with some claiming it had been sped up to make Acosta’s effort to hold on to the microphone seem violent. Watson’s video was a zoomed-in clip, in GIF format, of the original. Watson denied manipulating the video in any way, saying he was forwarding something that had originally appeared on The Daily Wire . In an article on Vice’s Motherboard (motherboard.vice.com), two experts in image analysis believed there had been no alteration to the original video, although one of them, Jeff Smith of University of Colorado, Denver did note that there were “duplicate frames at the moment of contact”. Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor with a speciality in image analysis and human perception, said that after his analysis, he did not believe the video had been doctored.
severing the intern’s arm at the shoulder, complete with sprays of blood. The debate has galvanised concerns about the impact digital manipulation of documentary video evidence can have on public discourse. It’s feared that the very question of whether or not an image or video has been manipulated begins to erode trust in the press and institutions. The New York Times reporter, Adam Ellick, commented on NPR’s radio programme, Fresh Air: “A lot of people, a lot of analysts, even, still describe fake video as sort of the future frontier of fakes. But it’s the present… I just worry that we’re constantly lagging behind a lot of other countries when it comes to detecting this and sort of wrestling with the consequences of disinformation.”
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook