ABC News apologized on Twitter Monday after mistaking a video of a nighttime demonstration at a Kentucky shooting range as Turkish militant fire on Syria.
The network aired the video twice, on ‘World News Tonight’ on Sunday night and ‘Good Morning America’ on Monday morning, purporting it to show the “fury of the Turkish attack” on the Turkey-Syria border.
“This video, right here, appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town,” ABC anchor Tom Llamas said during the broadcast.
However, several media outlets have matched the footage to that from the Knob Creek Gun Range’s biannual 2017 machine gun shoot. In the original footage, tracer rounds are fired by automatic weapons amid explosions, filmed by people on their cell phones.
“As of right now … it seems to be our footage,” a spokesman for the Knob Creek Gun Range told the Washington Examiner.
The clip broadcast by ABC News does not appear to show the cellphones filming the demonstration. The network has stated that they have since removed the video from both segments.
“We’ve taken down video that aired on “World News Tonight” Sunday and “Good Morning America” this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. ABC regrets this error,” reads tweets from the accounts of both shows on Monday morning.
