At the end of October 2023, Russian media and Telegram channels accused a reporter from Romania of allegedly faking being hit by a Hamas rocket attack. It is reported that the journalist was reporting while lying on the ground while people walked calmly in the background. We have verified the veracity of such accusations.
On RuNet, publications about the allegedly fabricated report began to spread en masse on October 23. If you believe numerous posts and notes in the media, during a live broadcast on the Romanian TV channel Digi24, correspondent Cristina Cileaku pretended to be reporting under fire in Israel. The authors of such publications point out that calmly passing people and passing cyclists are visible in the background of the video. “The Romanian journalist, right while reporting from Israel, was forced to throw herself on the ground, fleeing the inhumane bombing of Hamas terrorists. They hate the voice of truth so much that they are hunting for it, and have no complaints about other passers-by - they calmly walk around, ride bikes,” writes the Telegram channel “The goat screamed"(206,000 views at the time of writing this analysis).
Similar posts about allegedly invisible shelling appeared in the channels of TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov (239,000 views) and Ruslana Ostashko (116,000), "Live broadcast"(768,000), Shot (292,000), "Media Russia is not Moscow"(272,000), "Putin on Telegram"(197,000), Voblya (167,000), "Oleg Tsarev" (166,000), "Heavenly"(159,000), "Evil proof️" (146,000), "Briefly speaking"(140,000), "Bullet"(137,000), "First People's"(135,000), "Operation Z"(117,000), "Pool N3"(114,000), "Yakov Kedmi"(86,000), "Ministry of Truth"(27,000), as well as on VKontakte (examples here, here And here), social network X (formerly Twitter; for example, in the account SVTV News) and on "Peekaboo"
Many Russian media outlets also disseminated information about the staged report from Romanian television. So, in the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets“The article was published under the headline “Romanian journalist suspected of dissembling because of reporting on Israeli shelling,” in “Arguments and facts“The missile attack was called fictitious and the text was accompanied by the tag “foreign media fakes,” on the website Life the reporter was called “an actress without an Oscar”, in the public Readovka on VKontakte - “actress of a burnt theater”, and on “RIA Novosti” published an article under the headline “Romanians ridiculed a journalist who went on air lying down ‘due to shelling’.” Similar recordings appeared on the resources of TV channels “Constantinople", "Moscow 24", "360" And "Solovyov Live", as well as "RT in Russian", Lenta.ru, "News", "Pravda.ru", EADaily, "Sputnik Near Abroad", News.ru, "Russian spring", "Staff Correspondent", "Notepad Russia", "Moscow region today" And Avia.pro.
Most of the posts and news stories mentioned above contain video less than 30 seconds long, which is a recording from a TV screen. It shows a reporter lying next to a car, with no sirens heard in the background, and two men visible in the background: standing by a bench (in blue) and standing up from behind it (in black) - and two cyclists passing by the journalist. In the lower left corner of the video is the logo of the Romanian TV channel Digi24. “They are close to us... It seems they have already stopped. Israel is probably intercepting all these bombs. We will remain in this situation for a little while longer, because you never know when the bombing will stop... Everything is fine, everything is calm, I’m trying to get up,” the journalist says in the frame.
How found out fact checkers from AFP, the viral video is a genuine fragment of a Digi24 broadcast. According to the channel's official website, reportage was filmed on October 22 after 11 a.m. in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, located approximately 10 km north of the Gaza Strip and after a Hamas attack regularly exposed shelling. Fragment of this story showed on the newscast that same day at noon, and a short excerpt that later went viral appeared in the Russian-language segment of Telegram no later than the evening of the same day. At the same time, on English And Romanian languages, similar publications appeared a few hours earlier, and the likely original source of the recording was a Romanian-language TikTok account ovipau (1.6 million views) where is the video posted at 12:09 Moscow time.
On the Digi24 website, the original video of Chilyaku's report lasts 29 minutes. 46 seconds, and the correspondent first appears in the frame at 02:56. At around the 05:00 mark, she says that the residents of Ashkelon cannot stay at home all the time and that when alarms sound, everyone runs to shelters, of which there are plenty in southern Israel. At the 05:13 mark, Chilyaku says, “Everyone knows what to do, and the Israeli army now has a lot of confidence,” and then the sound of a siren is clearly heard. Noting that the alarm sounded, the journalist and her colleague took refuge in a nearby car (05:19).
Then, already lying near the car, Chilyaku says: “It is recommended to lie down if there is nowhere else to run, and that is what we are doing now. Explosions are heard and the alarm is still going on. The only thing you can do now is lie down and wait for the shelling to stop.” The sound of an explosion is heard at 05:33 and the alarm ends at 05:45. The fragment that went viral begins at 05:47, that is, after the missile attack signals stopped sounding.
As for the people who, according to numerous posts, walked calmly and did not pay attention to the shelling, at the 05:35 mark you can see how in the background during the alarm a man in black goes to a bench and sits down behind it. At the same time, a man in blue approaches him, but the siren manages to fall silent. Accordingly, the viral video only shows how one of the men got up after the alarm ended. The cyclists came into the picture even later.
Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the air raid.
The Romanian journalist was reproached not only by Russian media and Telegram channels for spreading disinformation. Yes, at home instagram* And Facebook* Cileaku was accused of creating a staged story by the former Prime Minister of Romania Victor Ponta, who wrote: “In a normal country with a normal press, this madam, who “broadcasts on her stomach” while people ride bicycles around her, goes on air and apologizes for mocking viewers and reporters who are actually putting their lives in danger. After that, she politely announces that she is resigning (so that the TV channel she works for doesn’t kick her out)!”
In response to Chilyak published on LinkedIn a message in which she herself criticized the politician for spreading fake news: “The former Prime Minister of Romania, and now an honorary adviser to the Prime Minister, allows himself to spread false information about my work and especially ridicule the war in Israel. When you don't value yourself, you try to make others less valuable. It’s just that a faded political career remains faded. In journalism, the truth always comes out. Fake politician = fake news.”
In turn, the Digi24 TV channel came out in defense of its employee, by publishing an editorial on the website explaining what happened and criticizing Ponta. The text explains how a person changes his behavior during long military conflicts. “People living under fire every day perceive alarms as part of everyday life and create their own hierarchy of danger levels. For a person who hears several alarms a day, fear arises only when a rocket falls in close proximity to him,” the material begins. In the second part of the article, the channel commends Chiliak and her colleague for following Israeli security protocols during an air raid: “As a journalist, you work with a large amount of very sensitive information, but you are often a role model, and your behavior can become a model for others.”
Thus, the reports about the production of the report from Israel and the video illustrating them are misleading: the original video was cut so that viewers would not hear the siren and subsequent explosion. A journalist from the Romanian TV channel Digi24 took the recommended precautions immediately after hearing the alarm, but this is unclear without context.
Note that a couple of days after the initial false reports about Cristina Chileaku in some Telegram channels, including Russia 🇷🇺 Live (30,000 views), "Sunshine" (27,000), "Crossbow l Arbalet 🇷🇺 Z"(20,000), "Wagner on Telegram"(16,000), ECO (15,000), "Russian Federation" (13,000) and "Animal burial ground | 18+ | Dead crests"(9000), information appeared about the alleged murder of a reporter. “A Romanian journalist filming staged footage of Israeli shelling was caught by Hezbollah militants. Hezbollah militants published a photo of the murdered journalist. The footage is strictly 18+. We published a photo of the mutilated body in our second channel "Country 404“,” said the already deleted posts. In fact, this was a fake advertisement: the journalist, as follows from the text above, is alive, but there are no such photographic materials in the mentioned channel.
In addition, in some posts about the Romanian report mentioned Another alleged production: allegedly a CNN video appeared on the Internet, in which a voice-over dictates to journalists of an American television channel how to behave while connecting to the air from Israel, so that the footage looks more impressive. "Verified" sorted it out This video established that it was fabricated - an American blogger deliberately superimposed a different audio track on the original CNN video.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Instagram and Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: Digi24
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