Al Jazeera clarifies Egypt video error

During Al Jazeera’s rolling news coverage of the protests in Egypt on Friday night, an error occurred which resulted in a pro-military demonstration being marked as “anti-military rule”.

This was an unfortunate human error that was caused by the wrong satellite feed being selected and images from the Presidential Palace being aired instead of the intended images from Nasr City.

The error was corrected as soon as it was possible to do so.

Throughout the protests in Egypt, Al Jazeera has been employing a split-screen technique to allow viewers to see protests from both sides on air at the same time, sometimes using four different video feeds simultaneously.

The feed marked as anti-military was meant to be pulled from Nasr City.

This sustained effort to offer a balanced view of events in Egypt has been a massive undertaking for both our reporters on the ground, and our producers and editors in the newsroom, especially when the reporting restrictions currently being imposed upon Al Jazeera are taken into account.

The mistake was highlighted both by Al Jazeera’s quality monitors and by our viewers and was corrected accordingly.

Unfortunately, our actions were not quick enough to prevent screen grabs being taken of the error and distributed on social media in an attempt to discredit Al Jazeera and pass this human error off as a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.

This is certainly not the case.

Al Jazeera acknowledges our error, but in no way is it part of a campaign to misrepresent events in Egypt.

Al Jazeera will continue to strive to report accurate and timely information from the country as it goes through this period of turmoil and change.

The incorrect labelling was a result of to the wrong video feed being used