Last week, CNN ran a segment showing correspondent Clarissa Ward helping free a man locked in one of recently-deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s notorious prisons. According to the report, the man had been imprisoned in a dark cell for months, and had not received food or water for four days. The scene was heart-rending as the man, trembling, was held up by a Syrian rebel on the one side and Ward on the other.

The two led him, limping and praising God, to a chair so he could rest. He clutched Ward’s hand tight, saying he had been beaten by Assad’s henchmen. Later, she would call it “one of the most extraordinary moments [she’s] witnessed” in two decades as a journalist.

Yet it took only days for a “Syrian fact-checking group” to reveal the prisoner was not who he said he was. Days after the video was published, Ward posted that CNN had been able to confirm the man’s name is Salama Mohammad Salama. But, as Community Notes pointed out, she failed to include crucial context: Salama was an Assad regime Syrian Air Force Intelligence Officer, particularly known for his use of torture.

By that point, users on social media had been poking holes in the story. Salama had neatly trimmed hair and fingernails. There were no obvious signs of abuse on his face. His jacket was clean. On leaving the prison, he looked right up at the bright sky — after months of supposed darkness — without blinking. And the four days without water Salama claimed he’d endured would leave a person not merely weakened but on the brink of death.

Soon it became clear that CNN had been, once again, caught doing what the mainstream media does. “You don’t get more CNN than this,” Robby Starbuck posted to the applause of 28,000 likes. “Uh oh CNN…lol,” Tim Pool wrote (with the same number of likes). The subtext: this was a stark reminder that the same institutions that claim to protect the public from infohazards and misinformation are themselves purveyors of misinformation.

Though true, it’s besides the point. What this episode really amounts to is a journalistic crime against the people of Syria. At the single most important moment in the effort to expose the atrocities of the Assad regime, we are, instead, talking about the clown show at CNN. This was, possibly, the aim of this seemingly pointless exercise in deception.

CNN may have been the dupe, but the people of Syria were the victims. For decades, the Assad regime has run the most horrifically effective torture and death machine on Earth. This machine has ingested 1.3 million Syrians, many of them imprisoned for the slightest of offenses against the regime, like organizing student activist groups or refusing to pay bribes to Assad henchmen. Ten percent of those imprisoned were reportedly murdered.

This is not the first time the media has played into the hands of despotic propaganda. As I wrote in The Gray Lady Winked, the New York Times reported Poland had invaded Germany at the onset of hostilities that kicked off World War II. This was, in fact, a propaganda ploy called Operation Himmler, designed to distract the world just long enough to give Hitler pretext to launch his blitzkrieg into Poland, which it did successfully.

Decades later, New York Times journalist Judith Miller stood in an empty swath of Iraqi desert and watched, from a hundred feet away, as a man in a baseball hat pointed to the ground, indicating the location where materials related to Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapons had been buried. That too was a lie, one that gave the Bush administration political cover — this was the deep blue New York Times’ reporting, after all — to launch its war in Iraq.

This monumental error wasn’t borne out of the Times’ desire to carry water for Bush, a figure the culture at the newspaper loathed. Rather, it came from a top-down imperative at the Times to increase its “competitive metabolism” by getting scoops and, just as importantly, by scooping its most fierce competitor, the Washington Post.

In Syria, we’ve just witnessed a similar campaign of deception. But, more to the point, we’re seeing yet another instance where the hunger for scoops and prizes — chatter on X about a Pulitzer for Ward erupted soon after the piece was published — blinded a journalist, and an entire network, to the plain reality in front of their eyes.

Had Ward slowed the story down and approached it not with a spirit of “the most extraordinary moment” in her career, she would have noticed anomalies like nicely trimmed hair and beard.

But even these details belie the bigger point: journalism is not about passing off to the public what a reporter sees at first glance. It’s about the painstaking process of confirmation and corroboration. While Ward, who displayed tremendous personal courage and professional intrepidness in traveling to Syria to cover these stories, may not have been in a position to do this, it is in the very job description of the many editors and producers at CNN to do exactly that.

CNN, for now, seems to want to gloss over the episode with assurances that it’s “investigating” what happened. But what happened is done. And while the network, like Ward, will recover, the moment has passed. Instead of widespread and intensive coverage of Assad’s charnel house and some semblance of justice for the genocide Assad perpetrated, the people of Syria got an American media circus in all its ludicrous glory.

— Ashley Rindsberg