Starting with Wednesday’s The Lead and continuing through Saturday night, CNN gave a massive 56 minutes (56:29) to repeated airings and subsequent fawnings over a supposed exclusive trip inside a Damascus, Syria prison by chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward that resulted in what they billed as the discovery and release of someone who insisted he had been stuck inside a notorious Assad regime prison for three months.
Some basic skepticism about its implausibility and public pressure later, CNN conceded they would investigate the circumstances of Ward’s report and a CNN.com article early Monday night confirmed a finding by a Syrian watchdog group that the man’s name was Salama Mohammad Salama (when he had claimed it was Adel Khurbar) and he was a lieutenant in Assad’s air force.
The whole thing seemed fishy, starting with the bizarre circumstances that Ward insisted in an X post was “one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in her “nearly twenty years as a journalist.”
She said in the TV report that she and her team were “hoping to find traces of Austin Tice, an American journalist held captive in Syria since 2012” by venturing inside one of the Assad regime’s secret prisons and while they didn’t find Tice, they came “across something extraordinary” with fighters exclaiming they might have found someone in a cell.
Along with the fact that the regime had fallen on Sunday and this happened on Wednesday, it seemed dubious. It was made even more implausible when Ward revealed a rebel fighter made CNN “turn [their] camera off while he shoots the lock off the cell door” and found “something under the blanket.”
Allegedly confused and frightened, the man said he was a “civilian” and clung to Ward as she assured him she was a “journalist” and fetched him water.
The man’s fable continued to spin as he gingerly was led out of the prison and claimed to have no knowledge in his three months of captivity that the Syrian government had collapsed.
In the CNN.com article, producers Tim Lister and Eyad Kourdi were forced to relay more of Salama’s tall tales as they published the embarrassing news:
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.
CNN initially found the man while pursuing leads on the missing US journalist Austin Tice. In a video report, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her team, accompanied by a rebel guard, came across a cell in a Damascus jail that was padlocked from the outside. The guard blew off the lock with a gun, and the man was found alone inside the cell, under a blanket.
When he emerged into the open air, the man appeared bewildered. Questioned by the rebel fighter who freed him, the man identified himself as Adel Ghurbal from the central Syrian City of Homs.
He claimed that he had been kept in a cell for three months, adding that it was the third prison where he had been confined. The man also said he was not aware that the Assad regime had fallen. He was being held in a jail that had been run by the Syrian air force’s intelligence services until the Assad regime collapsed.
After airing the footage for the first time, The Lead host Jake Tapper gushed Ward’s report was “just absolutely remarkable” and “another” case of “vital, vital journalism” while Ward herself took these claims as gospel (click “expand”):
Jake, I have to say, I have been doing this job for nearly 20 years now, and that really was one of the most extraordinary moments that I have ever witnessed. We don't know why the regime of Bashar al-Assad took Adel Khubar (ph). He doesn't know why they took him. He was basically living a very simple life in the city of Homs, in an area called Khalidiya. He said the Mukhabarat basically came to his house and said that there was some issue with people he had been making phone calls with. But we have to be very clear here. This is the type of thing where the Mukhabarat would take anyone with impunity. They would detain them. They would interrogate them. They would beat them. They would keep them for months, years on end. They didn't have to give a reason. You didn't even have to be an activist. You didn't even have to be part of the opposition against Bashar al-Assad.
So many of the people, Jake, who disappeared inside these dungeons were ordinary Syrians struggling to understand what on earth they had done to get there in the first place. We don't know where Adel Khubar (ph) is now. He got into that ambulance. We offered to give him our phones to call his family. But as you can see, in that moment, he was in a state of profound shock. He wasn't able to collect himself to the point where he was able to get in touch with his family. But all of us, of course, are wishing that he is safely reunited with them and that all of the prisoners who have been held for so long without any legal recourse, those who are alive, will be returned to their loved ones soon, Jake.
The Lead segment totaled 12 minutes exactly and was followed Wednesday with seven minutes and 37 seconds on AC360. On Thursday, Ward’s fake story ran five times on CNN’s flagship U.S. station (CNN Newsroom with Max Foster, CNN This Morning, the AM and PM editions of CNN News Central, and CNN Newsroom with Pamela Brown).
Foster called it “what a story” while CNN This Morning host Kasie Hunt hailed Ward’s “remarkable reporting.”
A few hours later, morning CNN News Central co-host Sara Sidner praised Ward’s “incredible story” and “incredible reporting” illustrating “such a moment of humanity in a place where we have seen so much death and so much carnage.”
However, Sidner’s co-host John Berman was first to open the cracks on the story’s credibility, making clearly “CNN cannot verify why that man was questioned by Syrian intelligence” and referenced questions in Ward’s reporting being asked of him why he had a cell phone if he was a prisoner.
With X posts and common sense starting to set in, the story vanished from CNN’s airwaves after a run in the 2:00 p.m. Eastern hour until early Saturday night when CNN Newsroom with Jessica Dean gave it one last run and made no comments prior or after about concerns surrounding its accuracy.
