This seems quite extraordinary. This clip seems to show BBC World reporting that World Trade Centre Building 7 has collapsed on September 11th. Yet the reporter is standing in front of a window and WTC Building 7 is still standing in the distance behind her. More info here.
Is it possible that someone faked this footage — for example by taking a piece of the view from an earlier report and adding it to the later footage? It would be difficult because there is a zoom in as the reporter steps aside, so the camera can take in the skyline.
What would settle the matter? Perhaps if BBC World was to look at its original videotapes from the day? Yes, except that Richard Porter, the head of news at BBC World, reveals that the tapes have been lost by accident.
He says that if they reported that the building had collapsed before it actually did, then that was ‘an error’. A couple of minutes before the actual collapse the link, between Phillip Hayton in the studio and the reporter in front of the window in New York, goes down.
Was WTC Building 7 expected to collapse? Sometimes journalists do write stories in advance of an event happening. Obituaries of famous people are an example of that. Possibly someone wrote a piece with information about the building, it case it did collapse and this was then read out as fact by mistake? It’s quite likely the reporter wouldn’t know which building was which on the skyline. I don’t believe for one second that the BBC is involved in any kind of conspiracy.
Are there no tapes from the camera that was with the reporter? Sometimes they make a camera recording even as they transmit a live link.
After all the negative publicity surrounding the junking of programmes in the 1970’s, the BBC is still losing original material from events as important as this? That is shocking in itself.