CNN suggested on Monday that a segment that was produced by correspondent Clarissa Ward in Syria last week — where her team helped free a man who was locked inside of a jail cell — was false because Ward had been duped.
The man “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 said.
Verify-Sy, part of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, looked into the man, who identified himself as “Adel Gharbal,” and determined that there was no record of that person existing.
Instead, Verify-Sy says it identified the man as “Salama Mohammad Salama,” a man they say was “a first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence, notorious for his activities in Homs.”
CNN acknowledged that Verify-Sy’s reporting was accurate after the network obtained an…
