Steven N.Georg Spöttle, one of the pro-government media‘s favorite “security policy experts,” is being accused of creating fake news from manipulated footage to denigrate Ukraine, writes 444.
In a video posted on Pestisrácok on October 28, Spöttle claimed that Ukrainian officials were putting pressure on Washington to provide them with cluster bombs. The commenter then showed a video behind him allegedly displaying a bomb scattering “projectiles that also explode, which can cover an area the size of two football fields.”
Spöttle then added that the Ukrainians had already deployed this weapon of brutal destruction in the Donbass region. “We will show you some very sad footage of this,” he promised. “This is real footage of what the Ukrainians did in the Donbass – so there are some reasons for this war.”
The only problem is that the footage shown by the “security expert” was not actually Ukraine dropping such cluster bombs on the battlefield, but the Russian army using them in the Syrian conflict. It appeared to have been taken from a Fox News newscast in 2016 when Russian fighter jets attacked Aleppo, Syria, with cluster bombs. There was an Arabic-language logo overlay indicating the original source of the video, but Pestisrácok blurred it out.
Members of the investigative outlet Bellingcat previously stated on Scientific American that there had indeed been examples since 2014 of cluster bombs deployed in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but these appear to have been used primarily by the Russian side.
Momentum MP and party spokesperson Márton Tompos announced on Facebook that he would be filing a complaint against Georg Spöttle for news falsification.
We’ve gotten used to pro-Putin propaganda being pushed to the hilt in the Fidesz media. However, we are still not used to them falsifying specific pieces of news, manufacturing fake news and consciously attempting to deceive the public.
-wrote the opposition politician.
Spöttle makes no secret of who he supports in the Ukrainian conflict. On the Ultrahang podcast, the openly pro-government commentator said, “I don’t hide my views. I fully support Russia in this war.” [HVG]
“The mists of lies thickened more and more over Germany, given over to the lies spread day after day in millions of ways, from loudspeakers to printed paper. They had founded a special ministry for this purpose. With all the most modern technical means, it was suggested to the hungry that they were satiated, to the oppressed that they were free, to those threatened by the growing indignation of the entire world that the entire world envied them for their energy and glory.”
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermans (1933)
Quite appropriate!
Thanks Luis for the quote from Lion Feuchtwanger (Jewish German author who escaped from nazi Germany).Large scale lying -as you and most readers know- is the fashion these days of populist regimes and their “experts”. We can thank our editor for bringing this example to our attention.