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Did CNN’s Clarissa Ward Fake the Rescue of a Syrian Prisoner?
It wouldn’t be the first time they confused theater with journalism
[Updates at bottom of article (12/17/24)]
On December 11th CNN published a video of Clarissa Ward and her team entering a former Syrian Air Force intelligence facility in Damascus, which until a few days earlier had been used as a blacksite for political prisoners. They were looking for signs of U.S. journalist Austin Tice, who was arrested by the Assad regime in 2012. Ward and her team found no trace of Tice, but in a miraculous twist of fate they did find “Adel Gharbal,” a prisoner from Homs, who had been detained for three months and not yet informed of the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
It made for great television. Not only did Ward get to find a real Syrian political prisoner and interview him, she got to liberate him from the prison herself, saving him from certain death. A journalist’s dream-come-true: becoming the hero of your own story. Ward wrote on X.com: “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”
I don’t disagree with her.
In my thirty years of watching the news, it was certainly one of the most extraordinary moments I have ever witnessed, because I have…
