In April 2024, a fragment of a strange news broadcast allegedly aired in Ukraine made the rounds on social networks. We checked whether this program was actually filmed by one of the local channels.
As stated in publications, recently one of the Ukrainian TV channels reported that the Belarusian army had invaded Poland. The posts were accompanied by a video in which a girl in a television studio with a Ukrainian flag in the background reads out the following text in Ukrainian: “Poland is attacked from Belarus, breakthroughs in several places. The Poles made an official statement. The border is under a powerful blow. Something happened that no one expected. There are wounded border guards, military patrols have entered the battle. They took out weapons and began to defend the Polish border. The situation is escalating."
Many resources cited this video as an example of the fact that Ukraine has “its own reality.” Publications with similar comments were posted in mid-April by Telegram channels, among others, “Uncle Slava"(200,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Pozdnyakov 3.0» (166,000), Voblya (156,000), Rus_criminal (126,000), "Alexander Semchenko" (97,000) and "Petya the First"(91,000).
“Verified” analyzed publications on the website of the largest Ukrainian media and found no reports there about the attack of Belarus on Poland. However, in the Ukrainian-language segment of TikTok you can find fragments issues news, filmed in the same studio as the viral video. They are accompanied by flashy, clickbait captions: “A terrible crisis is coming to Ukraine. catastrophe, frosts and a big storm", "In Kuban raised banners of Ukraine. The man who raised the blue and yellow banners is Russian,” “Beyond Moscow burst the main dam, the explosion destroyed the supports", "In Moscow and Taiwan there are large earthquakes" In most cases, after a loud introduction, the TV presenter did not talk about exactly the event or not at all about the event that was stated in the title.
In one of these videos on TikTok you can see the logo. –
He belongs PTV - a regional Poltava television and radio company with license for broadcasting in 13 regions of Ukraine. In November 2023, a specialized publication “Detector.media" reported that the channel broadcast the Ukrainian national telethon "One thing new” (“United News” - Ukrainian), and four times a day two presenters went on air from the PTV studio.
One of these leading — Anna Mudra, which can also be seen in the viral video. The video itself (as well as similar releases with flashy titles) is not available on website and in instagram PTV, but the full episode from which this fragment was cut is posted on the official YouTube channel PTV UA (518,000 subscribers) and on one of pages this broadcaster on Facebook (135,000 followers).
Why is the regional Ukrainian TV channel spreading obvious fakes? If you look full version video, an excerpt from which has gone viral, you can see that immediately after the clickbait introduction, the TV presenter begins to talk about very real news: about attempt 220 illegal immigrants enter Poland from the territory of Belarus and about statement Alexander Lukashenko about his reluctance to join the war. Perhaps the misinformation in the headline and beginning of the releases is intended to increase traffic to the company’s pages on social networks. If you look at the names of others broadcasts PTV, it becomes clear that this is a deliberate policy.
PTV has already been in the center scandal in connection with such practices. In June 2023, the company’s YouTube channel posted news that units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces had broken into Donetsk and occupied the airport. Together with other fake headlines, this caused a meeting of the channel’s management, at which its director Bogdan Zvyagolsky admitted that the media had suffered reputational losses due to its editorial policy, took the blame for the oversight and resigned. “According to the editor who created this video at his own discretion, it should not have been made public. This was the working material for the upcoming satirical program. But I do not rule out that this was done for the sake of hype,” Zvyagolsky told reporters then. It seems that the new management has not made the proper conclusions - at least on the channel’s social networks you can still find news with misleading headlines and introductions. Presence of PTV logo in one of posts with a viral video suggests that it could have been shown on television (it was posted on YouTube without channel symbols). At the same time, “Verified” could not find any signs that the news was being presented as satirical.
At the time of publication of this analysis, PTV representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Cover photo: social networks
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