Global TV News caught cheating, red-handed

July 10, the Northern Insights posting I'm wondering related how Global TV salted its report by adding unrelated footage to its video report on the Toronto G20 demonstrations. People trust TV news in Canada to be honest and video should reflect reality not fiction.

Some readers indicated that I must have been mistaken, they could not believe that a national news service would broadcast a fake video report. Therefore, it is important to publish the evidence. During the live newscast, I recognized footage that originated in Vancouver during the Olympics when vandals broke a few windows and tipped over newspaper boxes. As you will see in the photos, captured from Global TV's July 10 5:30pm national news, one of the newspaper boxes being tipped was The Province. This happened on a Vancouver street February 13, 2010. In a case of yellow journalism, Global was trying to make the Toronto demonstrations more dramatic by spicing it with extra footage.

See the photos at:
http://northerninsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/global-tv-news-caught-cheat...
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The earlier article:
July 10, Global TV National 5:30 PDT reported on that day's Toronto Day of Action for Civil Liberties. Rights advocates called for a complete and independent public inquiry into the police response to G20 demonstrations and Global was unimpressed. They claimed 5,000 protesters had been expected - without saying by whom - and only 2,000 showed up. The reporter said this was evidence that civil rights advocates were losing public support.

Global showed incidents of G20 vandalism intended to inform or outrage casual viewers and help them to the conclusion provided by the Global reporter. I guess they were lacking in sufficiently outrageous footage of Toronto G20 vandals so they cut in a video of Vancouver black-bloc crazies knocking over two newspaper street boxes during the 2010 Olympics.

Gee, did that fit the Wikipedia definition of yellow journalism:
In the yellow journalism era of the 19th century, many newspapers in the United States relied on sensational stories that were meant to anger or excite the public, rather than to inform
We saw the media's ability to estimate crowd sizes when Corus Radio reported that "hundreds" of supporters participated in Andrea Morton's rally at the Legislature, while photographs indicated between three and five thousand participants. Canwest counted close to a thousand in Victoria.

But, Global went beyond that in "reporting" on today's Toronto event, admitting that while quite a few people participated, it should have been many more. So, apparently they counted not only people who showed up, they counted people who didn't show up but should have.

http://northerninsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/im-wondering.html