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This is the anatomy of a despicable act of journalist terrorism carried out in Latin America. The intention was to damage an American news organization. Instead, what it did was to bring into sharp relief the ignorance and dishonesty that so many Latin Americans put at the service of their obsessive hate of anything that has to do with the essential values of the United States as a political and economic entity — while they adore everything that is superficially emblematic of the greatest consumerist society which so desperately they want to emulate.
On the day of the attack to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, CNN showed a video shot in Nablus, a West Bank town under control of the Palestine Authority, in which its people, including several children, were waving flags in a boisterous celebration of the terrorist attacks against the United States.
Soon after, a "report" began to circulate through the Internet around Latin America saying that the video was a fraud, and that rumor was picked by journalists all over the region.
"On Friday, the newsroom of the daily O Globo in Rio de Janeiro was analyzing a video which could reveal that the scenes that went around the world showing a group of Palestinians in Lebanon [sic] correspond to 1991, a celebration of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq," breathlessly announced on Sunday 16 Osvaldo Tcherkaski in Clarin, the Buenos Aires daily with the largest circulation in all of Latin America, a report that was typical of what could be seen in other media all over the region.
Any journalist with enough professionalism and honesty to have read cables that Friday 14 were already on his screen would have seen this one of Associated Press dated in Jerusalem:
"About 1,500 Palestinians, many supporters of the Islamic militant group Hamas, marched in a Gaza Strip refugee camp on Friday, burning Israeli flags and carrying a large poster of Osama bin Laden . . . After the rally, plainclothes Palestinian policemen questioned several journalists, including staffers of foreign news agencies, and confiscated videotape and film as well as camera equipment . . . AP protested and demanded return of the video and other material . . . Earlier this week, Palestinian police stopped camera teams and photographers from covering a rally in the West Bank town of Nablus in which several thousand Palestinians celebrated the attacks on the United States . . . The journalists were told police would review the material before deciding whether to release it."
Meanwhile, through a tidal wave of e-mails thousands of Latin American were enjoying the rumor that not only pilloried one of the world's largest news organizations but also provided the opportunity for fatuous comments such as the one by Tcherkaski in Clarin, a good example of what could be seen in other Latin American newspapers.
Referring to the video, Tcherkaski said "American newspapers also do not investigate what happened, nor do they resort to other sources, to elaborate their information and search its meaning, that are independent of the apparatus that has been put in motion. They act as television does, according to the Washington high command, its new foreign policy and its brand new strategic-military doctrine."
Other journalists in the region launched themselves into a feverish "investigation" of the alleged fraud while, with their utter ignorance of the Middle East, they failed to notice that the flags waved by the demonstrators in the questioned CNN video were not those of Kuwait, as the authors and circulators of the rumor alleged so they could affirm it was a 1991 video, but the flag of the Palestine Authority, that had not come into use until after that entity was created in 1993 by the Oslo Agreements.
The whole bubble collapsed suddenly on September 18 when the administration of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, where the rumor had started, released an official statement saying that "UNICAMP informs that it doesn't know of a 1991 video aired by CNN . . . which was supposed to show images of Palestinians celebrating the terrorist attack against the United States."
The statement added that the a UNICAMP student "had received verbally the information that a professor at another institution had the videotape" and had sent this information to a list of e-mail addresses of members of a discussion group on social theory. When he was asked for more information "he again contacted the supposed owner of the tape, who then denied having it."
UNICAMP declared the video as "absolutely false" and vowed it would pay "singular attention to avoid the spreading of new rumors."
But by then the damage was done. All over Latin America the rumor had become fact, another example of how easily people there fall prey to false information that plays on their prejudices. Which is unfortunate, because accurate information has turned out to be crucial for the development of undeveloped countries.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com