Fact Check: Journalist Mistreatment In New York Unrelated To Bangladesh Violence; Viral Video Is Misleading

New Delhi (Visvas News). A video showing people mistreating a journalist has gone viral on social media, with claims that the incident took place during protests in Bangladesh.

Upon investigation, Vishvas News found these claims to be fake. The video pertains to an incident involving Samay TV correspondent Hasanuzzaman Saki in New York in 2020, which is now being shared with misleading claims.

What is going viral?

On August 7, 2024, Facebook (Archive link) user Rohit Kumar Rawat shared the video with the caption, “The liberal journalists of India who are celebrating the situation in Bangladesh should see all this! Especially look at people like Ravish Kumar, what barbaric treatment is being meted out to media people in Bangladesh.”

Investigation

To verify the authenticity of the viral claim, we extracted several key frames from the video using the Invid tool and conducted a Google Reverse Image search. Our investigation led us to the original video, uploaded by a Facebook user named Kazi Nasir Uddin on June 2, 2020. The details confirmed that the video is not from Bangladesh but from the US.

Further investigation with relevant keywords on Google uncovered a longer version of the video on the official YouTube channel of SOMOY TV. The video identifies, the person in the viral video as SOMOY TV correspondent Hasanuzzaman Saki, who also explained the incident in the video.

During the investigation, we discovered a report related to the viral claim on the official website of the Press Freedom Tracker, published on June 1, 2020. According to the report, SOMOY TV correspondent Hasanuzzaman Saki was reporting from Times Square in New York when some protesters mistreated him and his cameraman. The protesters not only attacked them But they also attempted to damage their mic and camera.

For more information, we reached out to Mohammad Shakiuzzaman, a fact-checker from Bangladesh, who confirmed that the viral claim is misleading.

Finally, we scanned the account that shared the video with the false claim and discovered a pattern of posts aligned with a specific ideology.