Last time it was Russia’s Ministry of Defence. This time it was the state TV channel Pervy Kanal that couldn’t resist the temptation to include screenshots from a computer game to spice up alleged reporting from Syria.
The Pervy Kanal report titled “Case File: Syria” was aired in a prime time Sunday evening news programme on 25 February. It celebrated the heroism of a Russian soldier who was killed in battle in Syria during the spring of 2016. However, at 02:35 in the video below, attentive members of the TV channel’s audience spotted a screenshot from a computer game called “Arma 3”.
In a comment to the Russian daily RBC, a representative of the computer game’s producers, Bohemia Interactive, stated that “no kind of permission has been given to use this material from our game in this way”. RBC also spoke to Pervy Kanal, where a representative blamed the video editors for having used material from the channel’s archives, “which was previously used for an item about computer games.”
In November 2017, Russia’s Ministry of Defence published sequences taken from the computer game “AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron” as what the Ministry labelled “irrefutable proof that the US provides cover for ISIS combat troops”.
