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Latest severe weather and my thoughts on the chaser fraud that happened last week.

Submitted by Doug on Sat, 07/19/2008 - 17:25.

To start out with, I have been chasing like crazy here to the point were Neva has been wondering when I am going to finish moving.  I was up by Canada the other day and then chasing in Northern Iowa the next day.  The storms up north of Grand Forks were pretty sweet but damn it is a Fn haul to get up there.  It's like driving from Minneapolis, MN to Kansas City, MO, it will take a while.  But it was worth it.  I just wish I would have got up their sooner.  The area is still way up north but when there is nothing else happening, it was worth the experince chasing tornadic storms why up north.

Chasing The Storm On The Boarder Of Minnesota and Manitoba

Lightning Up North Of Theif River Falls

Ok, now onto other news about the chaser community.  I really did not want to touch this one with a 100 foot pole but I will address it here and now.

A couple week's ago, a tornado was reported in Valentine Nebraska.  Video of what was thought to be the tornado was fed out to all the news media of the event.  And then all the other chasers saw it on viral video feeds and the network feeds and AP online feed. 

Then that is when a few of us started saying wow, that sure is a cool looking speed up video feed to make it look faster.  But wait, that tornado is spinning clockwise (they almost always spin counter clockwise) and then someone said, wait, that looks like the Rock Kansas tornado from June 12, 2004 which was same day as the Mulvane Kansas tornado day that must have been documented by several hundred chasers. 

So my buddy Dan looked into this further thinking someone pulled a fast one on all of the networks by ripping off footage from a chasers website and compared it to his own Rock Kansas tornado footage.  Dan found he was down the road from whoever shot the footage that was showing up on the Associated Press Feed and that the footage was infact the Rock Kansas Tornado that was flipped on the horizontal plain and speed up 4x the speed. 

We contacted the networks to let them know something was up because we thought that some chaser had his footage ripped off by someone and doctored to make it look different and then fed out to all of the networks.  Dan took this one by the horns since we are alwasys getting screwed in video sales by viewer video that is crap but the networks will take for free over professional video that is a lot higher quality.

This is when things got kind of interesting.  The tornado video was in fact a fraud that we caught.  Dan was the man for the networks to talk to since he was the one that spotted it and could prove it was a fraud with his own footage of the same event from down the road from where the fraud video was shot.  What was interesting was the fact that we thought we busted viewer submitted video as a fraud, it turned out it was another chaser that submitted his own video as a fraud from 4 years ago.  Someone at CBS News asked me if it was the video that Andy Fabel or Andrew Fabel sold them last weekend and thats when the whole bogus video started to blow up in the networks faces.

Once Dan put together the side by side video of the event for the networks to look at along with the origional event that Dan shot, we could sense that they wanted to kill someone.   Well kill they did not but it did create a hurricane of sorts within the whole news community because AP published what happened and it became front page news on all the news websites for a couple days.

Here is what KSTP, the station I freelance for in Minneapolis, this is what they had on their website.

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S506179.shtml

Created on: 07/11/2008 01:45:50 AM
By DAVID BAUDER
Tornado videographer denies doctoring footage
 

(AP) NEW YORK - A storm chaser accused of doctoring old tornado video and selling it under the pretense that it was taken last week in Nebraska denied wrongdoing Thursday, suggesting that professional jealousy was behind the allegation.

The Associated Press and video services operated by CBS, NBC and Fox pulled the video late Tuesday after determining that there was enough evidence to question its authenticity.

Andy Fabel agreed to sell the footage for $295 to The Associated Press, and also made it available to the other news organizations. The AP has purchased tornado video from Fabel on three previous occasions.

A fellow storm chaser, Dan Robinson of Appalachian Skies Media, contacted the AP to say he believed Fabel’s video was a doctored version of images taken of another twister that touched down four years ago in Rock, Kan.

Fabel told the AP on Thursday that he legitimately filmed the Nebraska storm. He said fellow storm chasers are "jealous of you if you got a tornado that they wanted. They’ll pack it up and try to crucify you."

Robinson said the image was "flipped" to make it seem the tornado was pointed in another direction, and the action sped up. The supposed Nebraska footage includes power lines not seen in the Kansas storm; it also is minus trees shown in the Kansas images.

Robinson said he was familiar with the Kansas storm because he, too, had filmed it from a similar angle. He said at least four other storm chasers who had witnessed the Kansas storm agreed on an Internet forum that the video was from Kansas.

The AP had sent Fabel’s video Sunday to nearly 2,000 Web sites that subscribe to the company’s Online Video Network, and more than 60 large digital customers that buy AP’s online content individually. Upon seeing the evidence, the AP eliminated the video from OVN and contacted its other customers to urge them not to use it, said Kevin Roach, the AP’s acting head of domestic broadcast news operations.

"We never want to mislead people," Roach said. "Based on evidence provided to us, we believe that the video was not authentic."

Roach said the AP looked at the two video streams side-by-side, and examined individual frames of the footage in making its determination. He also asked for opinions from a photo editor and third storm chaser, Roach said.

"It was rather definitive for us," he said.

The NBC, CBS and Fox services provide video to the networks’ affiliates. They had agreed to buy Fabel’s video and distributed it, then took it off their servers on Tuesday after suspicions were raised, representatives for the networks said.

"There was enough evidence for us to make it suspect," said Sharon Houston, an executive producer with NBC News Channel.

John Stack, vice president of newsgathering for Fox News Channel, said Fabel has been one of the top storm chasers relied upon by media for tornado pictures. Now he said Fabel’s work is suspect.

"The concern is whether he’s an actual newsgatherer or Cecil B. DeMille," Stack said.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

 

And then there is this one from the Chicago Tribune.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/chi-fri-tornado-fake-videos-jul11,0,7341604.story

It has the frame grabs from the two videos to prove it was a fake. 

This was a bad thing to do and to ruin everything and hurt the industry for $295?  What a idiot.