The viral CNN report from chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward about the discovery of an alleged prisoner in a Syrian jail continues to unravel.
The Backstory
If you haven’t been following it, Ward was searching for evidence of missing American journalist Austin Tice in Syria last Wednesday when she basically claimed to stumble upon this prisoner of the Assad regime.
The man was portrayed as this poor civilian who had been locked up by the evil Bashar al-Assad. Ward was traveling with a camera crew and an armed rebel escort when they found a locked cell in a Damascus prison. They shot off the lock and they rescued him. He apparently told them his name was Adel Ghurbal, he had been jailed for three or four months, and he had been in this particular cell with no food or water for four or five days.
The Controversy
Almost immediately, there were questions about the story because the man looked clean, he didn’t seem to be blinking in response to the sun when he went outside for the first time, there were no signs of abuse… the list goes on. A reporter who has been twice imprisoned in Syria even came out and said the cell didn’t look like a Syrian prison because it was way too clean. Those facilities are notoriously like pig styes. None of this seems right.
Then, the internet investigations and fact-checks began. As it turns out, CNN didn’t even have the guy’s name right. They went with his word, which was a mistake. On Sunday, fact-checkers at Verify-Sy published a detailed report identifying the man as Salama Mohammad Salama — a “first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence” who was “notorious” in the area for extortion and harassment. No one quite understands why he was in this cell at that particular moment or clearly acting a part.
CNN was left embarrassed because Clarissa Ward was in the report acting like Mother Teresa with the ‘oh, let me help you. Let me rub your back. Are you okay? Are you okay?’ Meanwhile, the guy is lying through his teeth. CNN and Ward have been humiliated.
Look, you can be embarrassed in this business. Sadly, every report is not foolproof. At this point, I would have gone the safe route and went out there to say, ‘I apologize to the audience. We did present it as we found it. Clearly, we needed another few days of fact-checking before we aired it. It turns out we were misled by this guy. We are going to investigate just how badly we were misled and why. We promise to do a follow up report.’ Everyone would have said, ‘Got it. Thank you, Clarissa.’
Why don’t you just do that? Why is everyone at CNN so dumb?
Ward’s Reponse
Here is what Ward did instead. When the story broke on Wednesday, she tweeted a link to the report and said “in nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”
The blowback started soon after, but she didn’t seem to mind. By the time we hit the weekend, she followed upon X with additional photos. “The man from our report, reunited with a family member,” she tweeted alongside pictures from the Syrian Red Crescent.
Oh, such a lovely success story, Clarissa. She was still not acknowledging the many problems people were raising with the report.
By Monday, we had already done two full segments about the issues with this report on The Megyn Kelly Show – not to mention all the coverage everywhere else. That is to say: The controversy was well out there. But all Ward said on X was “we can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama.”
It is as though in the original report she had said, ‘We found this man. He speaks a language we don’t understand and, therefore, we don’t know what his name is. We will get back to you.’ That would have made “we can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama” an appropriate tweet because the audience would understand you were digging and finally struck gold.
Instead, this does not at all acknowledge the fact that CNN misidentified an untrustworthy player in a piece by using a name he gave them that was not his. This does not apologize for that error or any of the other red flags people have found in the report that also need to be investigated. None of that is in there.
Clarissa Ward is trying to get credit for correcting her erroneous report without acknowledging the error, which is not consistent with journalistic standards or practices. She knows that and so does CNN. You are further embarrassing yourself. You made a mistake. Fix it and move on. Stop doubling and tripling down so that you don’t have to acknowledge you effed up. It is not brain surgery. Just own your mistakes.
Where It Stands
To add insult to injury, Ward’s latest post linked to a CNN report that to styles the discovery of this man’s real name as follows:
“As CNN continued to pursue information about the freed prisoner after the original report, multiple residents of Homs said that the man was Salama, also known as Abu Hamza.”
They are making this sound like they were just doing normal follow up as they would in any circumstance after they put a story to bed. That’s bullsh-t. After a normal story is put to bed, you move on and find the next story. You don’t continue kicking the tires on whether the person’s name is real. You did that because you were humiliated by the Syrian fact-checking organization that has been doing good work and holding people’s feet to the fire.
Verify-Sy said none of this is right, and CNN was forced to go back and figure out – through facial recognition technology – what they had gotten wrong. In doing so, they stumbled on a very big one, which was: This is not who he said he was. He misled us.
I wonder what else he could have misled them on? Well, if you read the report from CNN, it is unclear how or why Salama ended up in this jail and the network has not been able to re-establish contact with him. What a shock.
CNN, ladies and gentlemen. The most trusted name in news.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 967 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.