CNN, desperate to pull out of their financial tailspin, apparently resorted to a move so drastic it ripped their wings off. Faking the news. When the fireball clears, their bottom line will be a crater. “While searching a secretive prison,” Clarissa Ward conveniently discovered “a hidden prisoner still unaware of Assad’s ouster.” A particularly well-groomed prisoner.
CNN fakes news
It’s not a major surprise that CNN would fake a video as part of a news story. The unexpected part is that they got caught at it. Slapping a label of “dramatic re-enactment” on the screen wouldn’t get half the ratings numbers.
The liberal news network’s viewers, what few they have left, wouldn’t have noticed the difference. They assumed, incorrectly.
It was CNN viewers who called the truth of the video into question. The “prisoner” Ward spontaneously rescued “has a perfectly groomed beard, clean and trimmed nails, and appears to be bathed and fed.” He wasn’t all that hard to find, either.
It’s actually true that “thousands of prisoners” are being released from Bashar al Assad’s “infamous torture prisons,” in the wake of revolt. CNN’s unidentified prisoner allegedly isn’t one of them.
News isn’t the same as it was back in the two print-edition release per day era. Things were a lot more accurate and the journalism more professional when there was limited space to publish it in.
Talking heads on the networks would read the stories their editors liked the slant of on the evening broadcast. The cycle would start again on the next business day. By the time Cable News Network CNN came along, news had become a 24/7 “infotainment” business. The stories presented are a mish-mash of fiction and fact meant to hold your interest between commercials.
A windowless cell
Ward reported that the alleged prisoner “rescued” by CNN had been held “in a windowless cell.” That makes it awful strange that “he does not seem to struggle with adjusting to the sun as he is led away from the prison.” His clothes were freshly laundered.
“Looking good for a prisoner who was supposedly confined and starved in a prison cell for months by Assad,” one viewer posted on social media.
Once the comments started picking up steam the CNN “journalist” is “facing accusations of fabricating” the scene.
Other outlets had reported on that prison, before Ward did. It seems that it had “already been cleared by HTS.” Those are the Al-Qaeda related terrorists who kicked Assad out.
Before the scandal broke accusing Ward of creating a fake prisoner rescue, the CNN reporter doubled down. She posted a photo captioned, “the man from our report, reunited with a family member.” She didn’t call him a former prisoner.
Half of America is comparing Ward’s stunt with the one Anderson Cooper pulled. He once “sat in a puddle to make his viewers believe he was in a flood zone.” This one is worse, most say. CNN still claims “the identity of the ‘freed prisoner’ has not yet been confirmed.“
