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This week, Britain’s ITV broadcasted “Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA,” a documentary which included this 1988 Provisional IRA footage the filmmakers found on YouTube. The shocking footage shows an Irish helicopter being shot down using weapons allegedly supplied by Gadhafi.
Unfortunately, the footage is actually from the videogame ArmA 2. You can imagine how this might be construed as problematic by media watchdogs and regular ol’ citizens.
ITV stopped streaming the documentary almost immediately after the forgery was discovered. But, this being the Internet, of course their misdeeds were captured for the entire world to watch.
Crazy. ITV hasn’t commented on the matter, which seems like lazy filmmaking at best, or at worst, wholesale invention. PC Gamer Magazine reached out to Bohemia Interactive’s CEO Mark Spanel for the company’s thoughts — Bohemia makes the ArmA 2 game.
“Sometimes creativity and realism in our games lead into crazy results and this is one of such example. I just briefly watched the entire documentary and I still can not believe it as it is overall very serious and lenghtly feature,” he adds.
“We are surprised our games apparently may look real enough to some users already that they can not tell it is not real life footage.”
Is this what documentaries have come to? Don’t have the necessary footage, so the creators just gank footage off of YouTube? And from a video game?
At the very least throw some effort behind it and stage one of those awful History Channel-esque reenactments. ITV should know by now that you can’t get away with this in the Era of Internet Sleuthing.
