CBS News Caught Airing False Coronavirus Footage

There are some strange anomalies with much of the media’s coverage of the coronavirus. One of the biggest goof ups so far is perhaps CBS This Morning airing footage of an Italian hospital for what was supposed to be a story about a New York City hospital.  The footage was supposed to depict how busy and inundated New York hospitals were but the footage used was not even from the United States.

 Chasmar, Jessica. “CBS News Airs Footage of Overrun Italian Hospital during Report on New York City.” The Washington Times, The Washington Times, 31 Mar. 2020, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/31/cbs-news-airs-footage-of-overrun-italian-hospital

During the March 25 episode of CBS This Morning, a clip featured Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response team, expressing concern that there were not enough medical supplies. This was followed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is quickly becoming a beloved sensation, claiming New York City needed more ventilators and aid. However, some perceptive members of the public were able to discern that the footage used with this segment was not of any hospitals in New York City. CBS News instead used footage from a hospital in Bergamo, Italy. When the “mistake” was noticed, CBS News issued an apology.

“It was an editing mistake. We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows,” a CBS News spokesperson reported to Fox News.

In CBS News’s defense, this is not the first time media was caught embellishing stories and it most likely will not be the last. Fox News also cited the time in which ABC News made a similar “mistake” in the fall of 2019 when it aired footage from a Kentucky gun range while falsely claiming the footage was an intense battle between Syrian Kurds and Turkish forces.

There are more issues. CBS This Morning is one of many media platforms depicting footage of several patients and medical professionals while talking about the rising threat of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City. However, the depiction of some of the hospitals is in contradiction with what some of the people living close to some of the featured hospitals are seeing. Mainstream media outlets are reporting about packed overwhelmed hospitals with make-shift morgues being set up, but some passerby’s on the streets of New York are sharing their videos that show some of the featured hospitals to be empty with extremely low traffic. So, what is being shown on the news isn’t always matching up with eye-witness accounts.

This is the “war zone” outside the hospital in my Brooklyn neighborhood. https://t.co/66FZ9VO3Jj

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) March 28, 2020

The coronavirus is definitely real and it’s very serious. There are several cases growing by the day. However, it is largely believed by a growing number of people collecting receipts that something very suspicious is going on with the virus’s coverage. For example, when outlets were reporting about the need for make-shift morgues outside several US hospitals because of all the deaths, it was problematic because the national death toll was then only about 1100. Yes, it keeps rising, but when the national death toll was around 1100, all the featured hospitals claiming that additional refrigerated mobile morgues were needed, it didn’t seem to add up. Just doing basic math, with the death toll (at that time) being 1100 for the whole country, with that number also split up between several thousand hospitals across the nation, the hospitals shouldn’t have been overwhelmed needing to stack and store dead bodies outside. It’s true the steady rising national death toll has more than doubled since. And it is a very serious situation. However, many skeptics feel that still, at the moment the number of deceased has not yet reached a level that bodies would be filmed carried outside of hospitals all over the nation.

Yes, and again the virus is real and there are people getting the disease, and some people are dying, but the numbers weren’t matching what was being reported. So although the virus is a real threat not to be taken lightly, there’s also a reasonable assumption amiss that media and local politicians may be adding a little salt and pepper to the coverage.