A photo from a disaster movie was not used in reporting on refugees from Kyiv

On March 14, 2022, the profile of Petra Vidas published a collage with two photographs and the following description:

They take pictures from movies. This time they took a photo from the movie Deep Impact.

A scene from the movie Deep Impact is used for news about Ukraine.

How primitive it is to incite world war III. As if we have not learned enough in history class how terrible world wars were. Our children will learn in school that the third world war started because Ukraine wanted to be a member of the NATO pact. And our children will think that we are fools, that the whole world will perish because Ukraine wants to join the NATO pact, which, by the way, is the center of evil on earth.

The photo above shows a large column of cars, with the description “escape from Kyiv” in Italian. In the upper right corner, it says “TGCOM24”. Below is the same photo, with the explanation that it is a scene from the movie “Deep Impact”. These photos were originally published on March 4, 2022, on the Facebook profile of Is Tina Pravda, in the gallery with a few more photos, claiming to show “fake news” and media propaganda. Until writing this analysis, the same claims were made on the Facebook pages Simply me and Ponosni na jugloslovenske uniforme as well as on the profile of Bozidar Jagunec.

What are the facts?

The logo seen in the upper right corner belongs to the Italian television TGCOM24. There were accusations on social networks that this television, while reporting on the war in Ukraine (1, 2, 3), used a photo from a 1998 American movie, “Deep Impact”. Fact-checking websites around the world have addressed these claims. In an article published on March 2, 2022, the Italian website Butac stated that it was true that the photo was taken from the movie “Deep Impact”, but that it was not true that TGCOM24 television published it while reporting on Ukraine. This website contacted one of the editors of TGCOM24 television, who confirmed that the photo was not published in their program as part of a report on Ukraine. For the purpose of writing an article on this topic, the journalists of the Check Your Fact searched the TGCOM24 website to find an article in which this photo was allegedly published, but they did not find it:

Check Your Fact has not found articles that use the film scene on the TGCOM24 website nor does it appear in any of the posts on Facebook and Twitter of this media.

Also, the recordings of this television program show that their logo is placed differently from the way it was featured in the photo from “Deep Impact”. So, the claim that this media house published a photo from the movie “Deep Impact” and presented it as a photo of the escape from Kyiv is not true. Given all the facts, we assess the claim suggesting that the scene from the movie “Deep Impact” was used for the news about Ukraine, originally published on the profile of Is Tina Pravda, as fake news. We evaluate all transmissions of this claim as the distribution of fake news.   (Author: Denis Čarkadžić and Nerma Šehović, Raskrinkavanje.ba)