grammar - in gruesome video of -- why no article?

Example with a context:

This week’s alleged kidnapping of 90 Syrian Christians sent shock waves around the world, but the young men of the Islamic State have been flagging for months now a simple idea: They follow an interpretation of Islam that blesses a 7th-century Quranic war strategy (9:5) to “capture and besiege” anyone who is a mushrikun, or “polytheist,” and Christians, in the world view of the Islamic State, fall into that category.

In gruesome video of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians released last week, Arabic writing flashes over the image of the Christians in captivity (in 3:28 — 3:40 of the video), reading, “They call upon their God and die as al-mushrikun.”

I'm wondering why there is no article in front of gruesome video. Obviously, according to the most basic English grammar rules, it really should be in the gruesome video of or in a gruesome video of. Am I right or is there something I'm missing?

Answer

There's something you're missing: video is being used as a mass noun.

Omitting the article invites you to think that there is some amount of video "footage", measured in total minutes, not a single "video".

You can do this with many nouns in English that are primarily count nouns:

Let's get a pizza! / Let's get pizza! [The latter doesn't specify how much or how many.]

Biblical scholars study a lot of texts [specific written documents]. / Seneca the Younger wrote a lot of text [all of Seneca's writing imagined as if it were a sort of liquid, not distinguished into separate documents].

You can't do this with most nouns, though:*

Let's hail a taxi. / Let's hail taxi. [Sorry, no one uses "taxi" as a mass noun.]

Let's read a book. / Let's read some book. [With a mass noun, "some" means an unstated amount of it. But with a count noun, "some" means an unstated particular instance. "Some book" means roughly the same as "a book".]

I don't know of any rule to tell which nouns you can do this to and which you can't. Somehow, though, when I hear a count noun used as a mass noun for the first time, usually it sounds natural. I think there are just a lot of rough categories, familiar examples, and customary ways of interpreting a count noun as a mass noun and vice versa.

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By the way, if they wanted to refer to a single video, correct grammar would be a video, since the video has not been mentioned previously.

When they refer to it later (in parentheses), they do refer to it as "the video". "The" can refer back to a previous count noun or a previous mass noun, so "the" alone doesn't disambiguate. From the time markings of 3:28 and 3:40, though, they're clearly referring to a specific video. So, they could have said "In a gruesome video", and indeed the writing would be a little clearer and smoother if they did. It might even be a typo which just happens to be grammatical.

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^{* Well, you can do it to any count noun but often the result is strange or poetic language.}