CNN's Clarissa Ward issues the lamest excuse for a retraction, ever

It was ... love.

It was triumph. It was freedom. The hugs flowed.

CNN put on quite a show from correspondent Clarissa Ward, who depicted herself bravely standing up to free a purported Syrian political prisoner in now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad's dungeons, in a CNN broadcast.

"Does anyone have any water," she asked as the video played to viewers, all severe and nursy compassion.

After that, food, and the hug:

And the joyous reunion with relieved family members:

Ms. @clarissaward Now might be a good time to delete any mention of this heroic act you did for this Palestinian in Syria pic.twitter.com/i96hwZ5Cge

— Uri Israel (@Israel2252) December 16, 2024

Ward called it an 'extraordinary moment.'

And Jake Tapper gushed:

This one gushed, too, hailing Clarissa's bravery:

 

Just one problem: the whole thing was fake.

 

Actually, he was one of the torturers who reportedly did a lot of extortion on the side, according to Twitter's community notes.

According to the New York Post:

The prisoner CNN helped free from a secret facility in Syria was actually a notorious member of Bashar al-Assad’s forces known to torture those who refused to pay him off, according to a shocking local fact check.

The network went viral last week with footage of the startled prisoner being led from the prison by journalist Clarissa Ward, who called it “one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed” in her 20 years of reporting.

But “independent and unbiased” fact-checkers Verify-Sy published a detailed report Sunday saying that the seemingly innocent prisoner was actually Salama Mohammad Salama — a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence with a long history of alleged war crimes.

“We have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity,” CNN acknowledged to The Post. “We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story.”

In earlier tweets, the Post notes she's been accused of staging news before -- note the damsel-in-distress screen shot below. If true, it could be a pattern:

Makes me wonder about this one, too:

Twitter denizens exposed it early.

Ward put out the most cringeworthy correction ever, trying to make it appear that it wasn't a correction requiring a retraction at all, just a little new information that Twitter denizens had already told us about, so it wasn't even new:

Nothing to see here, move along, Clarissa has caught up to the facts everyone else already had figured out, and pay no attention to that initial report she put out.

Naturally, she got scored on X:

But the hard facts here merit it. There are reportedly 100,000 prisoners locked away in Assad's dungeons now being freed and somehow, she picked the fake one?

How'd she get sucked into this scam? Who was her fixer? (Parachute journalists, journalists who don't know the language of the country they are covering, and reporters in extreme war zones have "fixers.")

Why did she pick that fixer even though she had her choice of fixers, some of whom might have even been good fixers?

That would be the story she should report but isn't reporting. She's just pretending there's no issue here and would like the rest of us to turn away from that egg on her face and go along with her latest fiction.

Anyone can get fooled, and for a reporter of news, it's particularly embarrassing, which is why good reporters check and check again on the reliability of their sources, and when they report something as bad as this, they explain what happened.

The correction reveals nothing of this sort, so we don't really know if she got fooled because she failed to vet her sources, or she colluded with the bad guys to get the scoopy glory and future awards?

That's what she needs to do to restore her credibility here. But she's not doing that.

Staged trash like this is why people quit paying attention to war stories. I know I did back during the Yugoslavia wars in the '90s, when it was a constant he-said, she-said, with one lie being exposed after another. It's been going on at least since the Vietnam War and maybe earlier, when photojournalists rearranged the bodies of purported massacre victims, the better to smear U.S. troops as war criminals.

Viewers deserve better. Either CNN should come clean with how it came to report a fake news story, or its credibility goes to nil.

Image: X video screen shot

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