Russian TV station mistakenly airs footage of ARMA 3 during report on war in Syria
Blames archiving mix-up.
News by	Matt Wales, Reporter
Updated on 27 February 2018
A Russian television station has mistakenly aired footage from a video game during a report on the war in Syria.
As noted by the BBC, the suspicious footage was edited into a segment celebrating members of the country's armed forces on weekly programme Voskresnoye Vremya, which airs on Russia's state-run Channel One TV.
At one point in the video, a truck is shown being targeted through a gun sight. While the clip's appearance was brief enough to pass unnoticed by most, users of Russia's Reddit-like community site Pikabu were a little more observant, quickly identifying the footage as being from developer Bohemia Interactive's ARMA 3.
Channel One later explained that "the use of this frame was a mistake by the video editing director, who took it from the archive." It seems that the ARMA 3 clip originally made its way into the station's catalogue as part of a segment on video games.
Of course, the Russian media does have a bit of a history with this sort of thing. Last November, for instance, the Russian Ministry of Defence released an image supposedly proving that US forces were collaborating with ISIS - which quickly transpired to be a screenshot from a video game named AC-130 Gunship Simulator.
Three years before that, Russian government-funded TV network RT aired a screenshot from Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain as part of a political report on African soldiers.
These kinds of errors aren't limited to the Russian media, of course. Back in 2013, a Danish television channel apologised after showing an Assassin's Creed screenshot during a news report on Syria. In the UK, ITV also struggle to tell ARMA from real-life, mistakenly airing clips from ARMA 2 in a segment on a 1988 IRA terrorist attack.
And who can forget the time that BBC News mistook the Halo UNSC logo for that of the UN Security Council?
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Matt Wales
Matt Wales is a freelance writer and gambolling summer child who won't even pretend to live a busily impressive life of dynamic go-getting for the purposes of this bio. He is the sole and founding member of the Birdo for President of Everything Society.
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