An investigation is now underway at CNN after new doubts were raised about the network’s viral report from a Syrian prison.
CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward made international headlines last week when her team seemingly captured the moment a prisoner was found locked inside a jail cell in the wake of the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. Details of the report immediately raised eyebrows, and now it looks increasingly certain the story was not what it seemed.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Emily Jashinsky, host of Undercurrents on UnHerd, and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon, to discuss the latest developments and what CNN should have done differently.
The Initial Report
Last Wednesday, CNN ran a taped package featuring Ward and her team, which included an armed escort from the rebel faction that overthrew Assad, touring a secret prison complex and happening upon a locked cell.
Ward reported that the guard made them “turn the camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door.” Once inside, the camera panned to a blanket on the floor. The armed escort then lifted the blanket to reveal a man underneath. Ward said the man claimed he had “been in the cell for three months” and had been alone “with no food or water” for at least four days.
Rather than immediately take him for medical attention, Ward sat the man – who she identified as “Adel Ghurbal” – down for an interview. When Anderson Cooper asked Ward for additional details about the alleged prisoner and why he was incarcerated, she said little was known. “Well, we don’t know that much because you can see from the report, Anderson, that he’s in a deep state of shock,” she claimed. “And honestly, I don’t think he understands why he was taken.”
The Fact Check
While Ward called the scene “one of the most extraordinary moments” she has witnessed in her 20-year career as she received praise from fellow media-types, internet sleuths almost immediately began to question the veracity of the report.
People pointed to the cleanliness of the cell (a radical departure from other Syrian prisons), what good condition the man seemed to be in despite the lack of food and water, how quickly his eyes adjusted to the outdoors after being in a windowless cell, the lack of dirt under his nails, and the absence of signs of torture among other red flags.
Additional holes in the story emerged on Sunday when “independent and unbiased” fact-checkers Verify-Sy published a detailed report identifying the prisoner not as “Adel Ghurbal” but as Salama Mohammad Salama — a “first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence” who was “notorious” in the area.
Local residents told the fact-checkers he worked at several security checkpoints in the city of Homs and was involved in “theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants” of Assad. They also said he was incarcerated less than a month ago due to “a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer.”
In a statement to The Wrap and other outlets, CNN now says there is an investigation under way:
“We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity. No one other than the CNN team was aware of our plans to visit the prison building featured in our report that day. The events transpired as they appear in our film. The decision to release the prisoner featured in our report was taken by the guard – a Syrian rebel.
We reported the scene as it unfolded, including what the prisoner told us, with clear attribution. We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity. We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story.”
The Fallout
In Johnson’s view, CNN has a lot of explaining to do. “The open question is… Was CNN in on this or were they duped,” she asked. “Did they want and were they making a made-for-TV moment? Were they participating in this, or were they totally hoodwinked?”
Even if the Verify-Sy report is true, Megyn said it is still hard to sort out exactly why the man ended up in the locked cell after the fall of Assad’s regime. Jashinsky said she wouldn’t be surprised if it was some sort of double dupe. “It may be that he actually duped the rebels who… [then] duped Clarrisa Ward and the CNN team,” she said. “I think it does look like a combination.“
Her skepticism stems from what the rebel forces have been trying to portray to the western world. “This perfectly fits the propaganda that [Abu Mohammed al-Jolani] and the rebels right now are trying to distribute,” Jashinsky shared. “They are Islamists and what they need to show is that they are ‘freedom fighters,’ that they are liberating Syria from Assad. So, literally liberating a man from a prison is sort of exactly what you would expect to see from them.”
It is so “on the nose,” she added, that you would expect CNN to do its due diligence. “It is one thing for Ward to get duped the moment if it were happening live… It is a totally different thing to have a name and to have so many details [wrong],” Jashinsky explained. “Whoever is editing this package and producing this package would have the same questions, theoretically, that people have immediately had on the internet about the nature of the setup.”
Jashinsky believes a packaged report like this “should have gone through a lot of layers of editorial oversight,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case. “Why does this look like it is staged? Why does this all seem so strange? Those questions would have been asked in production, so it is all very, very, very odd,” she concluded. “It should have seemed too good to be true and that it didn’t, I think, is pretty suspicious and unfortunate for their credibility.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Jashinsky and Johnson by tuning in to episode 966 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.