Photo

Reporters who have searched for, and failed to find, any trace of the video Donald J. Trump claims to have seen on Sept. 11, 2001, showing “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims cheering in New Jersey as the World Trade Center collapsed, have been repeatedly assured by the candidate’s supporters on social networks that such footage does exist.

As evidence, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have pointed to a detailed account of a television report on the reaction to the attack in an Arab-American neighborhood of Paterson, N.J., described by Debbie Schlussel, a conservative political activist and blogger who is deeply critical of Muslims.

Writing on her blog in 2013, Ms. Schlussel insisted that “even leftist MTV News (yes, that MTV) broadcast news reports showing thousands of Palestinian Muslims outside Paterson’s town hall, cheering the 9/11 attacks against America (and starting a riot using cement garbage cans and metal poles, which they used to attack police).”

Over the holiday weekend, MTV News dug out the original report from its archives, and posted it online with a new interview of the sole witness to what appears to have been a very different event than the one Mr. Trump, and Ms. Schlussel, have been saying they watched on television.

The MTV News report, first broadcast on Nov. 17, 2001, looked into rumors of celebrations in Paterson and found just two sources: the witness account of a resident, Emily Acevedo — who recalled seeing about a dozen children, 14 years old or younger, “chanting and raving” and “saying ‘Burn America,'” outside the South Paterson library on Main Street that night — and a third-hand account from Curtis Sliwa, the host of a live radio show on WABC-FM in New York, whose listeners phoned in to say that they had heard of “people celebrating” on that same street.

Ms. Acevedo, who was a senior in high school at the time, told MTV last week that she was not sure if the rowdy kids were celebrating. In hindsight, she said, their behavior seemed more like routine “acting out.”

“What I saw that night,” she recalled, “is not anything, any different than would’ve happened on any other summer night, on any other day where school was let out early. These were kids acting out because they had the time to.”

Those accounts square with research into unsubstantiated rumors of mass celebrations of the attacks by Arab-Americans published in 2005 by Gary Alan Fine and Irfan Khawaja, a professor at Felician University in Lodi, N.J., in the book “Rumor Mill: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend.”

Before the MTV News report was posted online, Mr. Khawaja wrote on his blog last week that witnesses had told him that “the ‘celebration’ in question consisted of maybe a dozen or half-dozen teenagers jumping around and yelling. It dispersed relatively quickly (i.e., within a few minutes). The police were patrolling the area and claim to have seen nothing.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, made no mention of MTV’s findings, but instead shared just an 11-second clip from the report with his Twitter followers, which showed Mr. Sliwa confirming that he had heard of celebrations from his listeners. That excerpt, misidentified by the candidate as the video of the radio host “doing TV commentary on 9/13/2001,” appears to have been copied from YouTube by Daniel Scavino Jr., an adviser to the Trump campaign who specializes in making Vine videos.

Curtis Sliwa – doing tv commentary on 9/13/2001. Good job Curtis. Please send your apologies to @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/g07VZmNmAW — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2015

In response, Mr. Sliwa said on Twitter Tuesday that the clip of him had been taken out of context, and noted that callers to his show on the day of the attacks had reported seeing about a dozen teenagers briefly celebrating in Paterson, not “thousands and thousands.”

No apology, @realDonaldTrump. Callers to @curtisandkuby on 9-11 said they saw 12 teens celebrating in Paterson.https://t.co/6h6VNIZZMG — Curtis and Kuby (@curtisandkuby) December 1, 2015