Newsmax Fumbles: Iowa Collapse Drone Footage Used for Russia Story

The right-leaning television network, Newsmax, has faced public backlash for employing drone footage from a building collapse in Davenport, Iowa, while reporting on a drone strike in Moscow, Russia.

This past Sunday, a six-story building in Davenport partially collapsed. The city’s officials are currently assessing whether further rescue attempts are feasible, given the risk of the building’s complete collapse. Following the incident, five individuals are yet to be found, with two of them suspected to still be in the building, as reported by CNN.

However, on Wednesday, Newsmax utilized images of the Davenport incident during a report on a drone attack in Moscow, presented by Greta Van Susteren. By doing so, the network could potentially mislead its audience into associating the pictured destruction with the drone strike, which took place thousands of miles away.

The aforementioned drone attack is the first to have targeted a civilian area in Russia since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“This morning in Moscow, a city of 21 million people, there was a pre-dawn attack. Drones struck several buildings,” said the host during ‘The Record with Greta Van Susteren.’ Van Susteren continued to detail the situation, stating that Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed to have shot down five out of eight drones, while the remaining three malfunctioned.

Critics pointed out that one of the images from Iowa even had a visible ‘tow away’ sign, which evidently indicated it was not a scene from Moscow. However, Newsmax only displayed actual images from Moscow at the end of the segment.

Newsmax’s misstep sparked a wave of criticism on Twitter. Brian O’Sullivan, an author, tweeted, “Newsmax shows an apartment complex in Iowa while talking about drone attacks in Moscow. These are not serious people. Laughable, incompetent hacks.”

Another Twitter user noted the alarming level of incompetence from Newsmax, even considering their standards.

In a similar vein, Brandon Lee Bryant stated, “How someone in @NEWSMAX control room or producer either missed this or purposely used this video from Iowa to talk about Russia drone strike… is beyond me. It’s idiotic & ridiculous from all of them there… this is one of many reasons why ppl don’t trust ‘cable’ news.”