Facts Matter: Clips not related to Olympic torch lighting
The opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, on Friday, July 26, included some incredible images and the lighting of the torch.
Following the event, social media users seemed to post video of the torch lighting that didn’t appear during the broadcast.
“Lighting of the olympic torch, from a Paris church. Spectacular!” reads an X post that includes a clip showing a priest in a church lighting a rocket that travels up a platform and shoots out the door. The video then cuts to a different clip that shows a rocket hitting a tower and igniting fireworks.
But the claim that this video shows the opening ceremony is false, according to the Associated Press. It puts together two unrelated clips that have nothing to do with the summer games.
The video at the beginning of the false post was taken from an Easter tradition, called the Scoppio del Carro, which was performed at Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy. In the clip of the ceremony, the archbishop lights the Colombiana, a dove-shaped rocket symbolizing the Holy Spirit, which ascends a tower, flies out of the church on a wire, returns, and then lands on that same tower.
“Also for this year the flight of the Colombiana was perfect. An extraordinary show, Happy Easter,” reads the caption, in Italian, when the video was originally posted by Italy’s Firenze TV on TikTok in 2023.
In the fake post, after the rocket leaves the church, it cuts to a different clip of a rocket igniting fireworks, this one taken from a 2023 concert by German metal band Rammstein. The band used similar pyrotechnics throughout their European stadium tour that year.
As is Olympic tradition, the flame was lit in Greece, the birthplace of the games, and then traveled to France by boat, was passed among 11,000 torchbearers and then used to light the Olympic Cauldron.
Pritzker advances false claim
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a possible running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, talked about Republicans during a recent interview.
“I mean, on the other side, they’re just weird,” Pritzker said, referring to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance during an interview on ABC News. “You know, (former President Donald Trump’s) running mate, as you probably have heard, is, you know, getting known for his obsession with couches.”
But Pritzker’s reference, which he has alluded to in other speeches, is unfounded, according to PolitiFact. And the governor didn’t offer any evidence to support it.
Pritzker was bringing up a false claim that Vance describes a sexual encounter with a couch in his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”
The rumor was debunked by Snopes, and the Associated Press called it a fake claim in a fact check that was later taken down. NewsGuard reported it as a satirical post that “spread like wildfire.”
PolitiFact, while checking digital and paperback versions of “Hillbilly Elegy” said the passage does not exist.
Harris statement is altered
A video of Vice President Kamala Harris appears to show her confused while giving a speech.
In the post of the clip, Harris says, “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today, so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.”
But Harris never said this, according to the Associated Press. The clip has been altered.
The video, from a speech Harris gave on reproductive rights, in 2023 at her alma mater Howard University, was manipulated to change what it appears she said.
The fake clip was made up from a section of the speech in which Harris said, “So I think it’s very important — as you have heard from so many incredible leaders — for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future.”
Livestreamed versions and transcripts of the speech did not include the fake words.
Cartoon Network still in business
Recent social media posts could be a concern for some TV viewers.
“It’s the end of an era, Cartoon Network has officially shutdown,” read posts shared on X and Facebook.
But this is not true, according to Reuters. The claim originated with a post about animation industry workers’ rights.
“Animation Workers Ignited,” a community group on X, kicked off a campaign on July 8 titled #RIPCartoonNetwork, with a video highlighting challenges faced by the industry, such as “canceling of projects, outsourcing jobs, and laying off artists en masse.”
The network confirmed the claim is false.
“Cartoon Network would like to clarify that there is no truth to the speculation that the network or the studio are shutting down,” Cartoon Network told Reuters in a July 10 email.
• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.