11 August 2007Tom Parfitt
Unearthly blue lights played across the ocean floor two and a half miles below the north pole as the heroic Russian explorers descended in mini submarines to plant a metre-high flag.
At least that's what the Russian state television company Rossiya wanted us to believe. The truth was rather different.
In an apparent attempt to "sex up" a news programme, the TV station has been caught passing off footage from the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster Titanic as a real life report on the Kremlin's recent attempt to stake its claim to the riches of the Arctic Ocean.
Rossiya's images were distributed all over the world, appearing on television news broadcasts and websites in Britain and as "screen grabs" in newspapers.
It took an alert teenager in Finland with a Titanic DVD to spot the sham. Waltteri Seretin, 13, from Kemi, 450 miles north of Helsinki, recognised the images in the national daily Ilta-Sanomat.
"I was looking at the photo of the Russian sub expedition and I noticed immediately that there was something familiar about the picture," he told the paper. "I checked it with my DVD and there it was right there in the beginning of the movie: exactly the same image of the submer-sibles approaching the ship."
James Cameron's film about the 1912 disaster, which starred Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, opens with a scene of mini-subs diving to inspect the wreck of Titanic. In the Russian television report about the north pole, expedition, images from the movie were inserted seamlessly into real footage and bore an on-screen caption reading "northern Arctic Ocean".
As the Titanic images were shown on the Vesti news programme, a correspondent said: "When the mini submarine got to 300 metres, the unloading of the second sub began."
The two mini subs used by the Russian scientists, Mir-1 and Mir-2, were in fact made by a Finnish company and were used by Cameron in his film. However, it is thought the scene from the movie shown on Rossiya's Vesti news programme was originally filmed using scale models in a studio.
Rossiya is one of two state-controlled channels that have been turned into propaganda tools under President Vladimir Putin and it is the second time in less than a fortnight that Vesti has faked a broadcast.
Ten days ago it mocked up a copy of the Times newspaper to make it appear as though the paper had run a critical article on the London-based businessman Boris Berezovsky on its front page. In fact the article had appeared in the comment section.
Rossiya refused to comment on the "polar" footage, but the boy who identified it gave his damning indictment.
"I've heard they don't always tell the truth in Russia, but I didn't think they could have screwed it up that badly," said the teenager, who has watched Titanic at home on numerous occasions.
Russia's dive in two mini subs last week was trumpeted by Moscow as a PR coup in its effort to prove the Arctic is Russian. Veteran explorer Artur Chilingarov and his team returned to a heroes' welcome.
The TV fiasco will add fresh controversy to the expedition, which caused scorn and resentment among other northern hemisphere nations bent on getting their share of the Arctic's energy riches - at least 10bn tonnes of hydrocarbons.
Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, said there had been a clear attempt by the Russian channel to dupe viewers: "This is a sign of the sheer unprofessionalism that reigns when TV is turned into a pawn of the authorities."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2146629,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
