Last week, CNN aired dramatic video of a man being freed from a Syrian prison following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government. The piece made international news. It went viral in the media. I mentioned it prominently in this newsletter.
But after questions were raised about the authenticity of the piece, CNN did more of its own digging. Turns out, the story isn’t what we all, including CNN, thought it was. And now CNN has set the record straight.
Let’s go back to the original story. In the compelling video, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward and her crew, tagging along with rebels, appeared to have discovered a man who had been locked away and forgotten in a prison. In the video, Ward walks into a prison cell, where there is a blanket on the floor. Ward looks down at the blanket and asks, “Is someone there? Is someone there?”
Then another person walks up to the blanket and starts to lift it when a man underneath rises up, looking frightened and stunned, and puts his hands in the air. The man under the blanket then tells an incredible story. He says he has been in the cell for three months. Shaky, he clutches Ward’s arm and is given something to drink. He is then led out of the cell, free to go. Through interpreters, he tells Ward more about his horrific experience of being imprisoned.
Ward says in the piece, “Tens of thousands of Syrians have disappeared in Assad’s prisons. Up until 15 minutes ago, Adel Ghurbal was one of them.”
But questions were raised about the identity of the man, and whether what CNN seemed to capture was completely authentic. CNN investigated its own piece and now reports that the man was not who he said he was.
In a piece published Monday evening on CNN’s site, Tim Lister and Eyad Kourdi wrote, “A man who was filmed by CNN being released by rebels from a Damascus jail was a former intelligence officer with the deposed Syrian regime, according to local residents, and not an ordinary citizen who had been imprisoned, as he had claimed.”
Initially, Ward and her team were following leads and trying to discover the location of long-imprisoned American journalist Austin Tice. Then they came upon the dramatic scene that ended up on air. There is no evidence, nor reason to believe given her reputation, that Ward and her team staged the event. And to be clear, that’s not what CNN was looking into.
It would appear that CNN, Ward and her team were duped.
Not long after the CNN piece aired, some questioned whether the man was really a prisoner who went through the ordeal he claimed he did. He was better groomed and in better condition than one might expect, and his reaction to seeing sunlight seemed off for someone who hadn’t been exposed to the sun in three months.
A Syrian fact-checking organization said they believed the man was a “first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, notorious for his activities in Homs. Residents of the Al-Bayyada neighborhood identified him as frequently stationed at a checkpoint in the area’s western entrance, infamous for its abuses.”
It went on to write the man “reportedly managed several security checkpoints in Homs and was involved in theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants. According to locals, his recent incarceration — lasting less than a month — was due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer. This led to his detention in one of Damascus's cells, as per neighborhood sources.”
Meanwhile, CNN had already started looking into the matter. In a statement to The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr earlier on Monday, CNN said, “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.”
Barr added, “A CNN spokesperson said that no one else was aware that the network’s journalists would be visiting the prison on that day. The spokesperson also said that it was the guard’s decision to free the man, not one made by the network’s crew.”
Then, late Monday, CNN published a story that said the man was the same person that the Syrian fact-checking organization said he was.
Lister and Kourdi wrote that, using facial recognition software, they discovered the man was actually Salama Mohammad Salama, a lieutenant in the Assad regime’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate.
Lister and Kourdi wrote, “It’s unclear how or why Salama ended up in the Damascus jail, and CNN has not been able to reestablish contact with him. … Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.”
Certainly, one could understand why the man in the cell, acting out of self-preservation, might lie about who he was and what he did.
But what about CNN?
CNN could be criticized for airing a story before it was fully vetted. I get that the scene in Syria at the time was (and is) chaotic and details were going to be sketchy and hard to nail down. But many who saw the original piece immediately raised eyebrows. Mediaite’s Charlie Nash wrote a lengthy thread on X, saying there were a “huge number of questions” with it. He wrote that the day the story aired.
But to suggest that CNN knowingly aired a false story wouldn’t be fair.
Were they sloppy? Yes. Were they a little too quick to air a story that certainly was breathtaking but not completely fact-checked? It would seem so. Did they just assume the man was telling the truth? Again, it would appear so.
Were they knowingly deceitful? No, I don’t believe that.
As Barr noted in his Post story, journalists are coming to the defense of Ward, who is an outstanding war correspondent. For example, Fox News’ own superb war correspondent, Trey Yingst, wrote, “The attacks against @clarissaward are unfounded and ridiculous. She is an honest and professional journalist.”
More fallout from ABC’s decision
The media industry is still buzzing about ABC News’ decision to settle a defamation lawsuit by President-elect Donald Trump, who was suing over a comment made by George Stephanopoulos during an interview with Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace on the Sunday show “This Week.” On the show last March, Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found “liable for rape.”
Rather than fight Trump in court, ABC News agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum and pay for Trump’s legal fees.
In addition, they put an editor’s note on their website’s news story about the interview, saying they “regret” the statements made by Stephanopoulos.
So why did ABC News settle when it appeared to have a good defense? Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s. And while it’s true the jury did not find him guilty of rape, the judge in the case later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of “rape,” the jury did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
On the air over the weekend, MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade said, "It seems to me that with that language, with that quotation, ABC actually had a very strong case, but chose to settle. A settlement is not an admission of liability. It is instead an agreement to end the matter in the best interest of both parties. But they are agreeing to issue this statement of regret, which is not exactly an apology. But I do worry about the effect this could have on others and the chilling effect it might have on people who otherwise would be critical of Donald Trump.”
In his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote, “Judging from social media reactions to the news, partisan know-it-alls on the right think the ‘why’ is obvious: ABC lied about Trump, they say, so now the network is being punished accordingly. Some Trump critics on the left are also certain that they know what’s going on: They say ABC and parent company Disney are bowing to Trump for craven political purposes.”
Could there have been another reason?
Stelter quoted Ken Turkel, a trial attorney who is representing Sarah Palin in her defamation suit against The New York Times, who said “perhaps (ABC) didn’t want to be actively litigating against a sitting president.” Turkel also brought up another possibility: that ABC News might have been worried about emails, texts and other items unearthed in the discovery process that might have damaged its case.
Harry Litman, who was a legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times until he resigned last week, said on MSNBC, “I got to think that the ABC boardroom was involved in this decision somehow.”
Whatever the reason, ABC News is taking heat for settling a case that it had a good chance of winning.
The New York Times’ David Enrich wrote, “The deal set off criticism of ABC News by those who perceived the network as needlessly bowing down to Mr. Trump. And it led some legal and media experts to wonder whether the outcome would embolden Mr. Trump and others to intensify their assault on the media, at a moment when many news organizations are struggling with declining public trust and deteriorating finances.”
Speaking on CNN, host Jim Acosta said, “This is a time for our industry to stand firm and we're going to have a very important job to do. And that's not putting us on a pedestal or anything like that. But we're going to have a very important job to do, because Trump is not going to change his ways when he gets back into the Oval Office. He’s going to continue to say things that need to be fact-checked. You can't have the news industry worrying about this sort of stuff when they're just simply doing their jobs.”
Meanwhile, here comes another lawsuit
