CNN's Clarissa Ward stages a viral interview with a fake Syrian prisoner. What else has she done?
There's plenty to look into, and it's not just CNN.
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The name Clarissa Ward is likely not unfamiliar to you. Or, if the name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe this picture will evoke some memories:
This picture was taken on early October 2023, just a few days after the Palestinian Resistance launched Operation Flood of al-Aqsa. In less than two days, Ward travelled to the Nova Festival site in “Israel” to report from the ground.
In the course of that reporting, rocket fire broke out overhead, prompting Ward and her team to scurry into a ditch and do the reporting from there.
The footage, of course, went viral. It was raw, emotive, and pulled the viewers in: the neat reporter in a press vest, completely out of their elements, that suddenly has to face extreme danger but keeps reporting, ready to die in the line of duty just to bring the people of the world the unfiltered news.
It could almost bring a tear to my eyes, and maybe yours as well. This is probably why the clip went viral instantly, with dozens of other major outlets reporting on this one instance: on top of her own employer at CNN, TMZ, Yahoo News, and even the Hindustan Times (second most-read English language newspaper in India) all happily repeated the story above among with smaller publications.
It became a viral story.
Of course, Clarissa was never in any danger. I won’t go to the extent of saying that the attack was staged, but certainly her act was. From the longer video available on CNN’s own Youtube channel, we notice that she was quite alone in that ditch (her team excluded). As she emerges from the ditch and the camera pans around, we notice people slowly emerging from their vehicles and other spots. Why was it that she had to jump in that ditch but others did not? Clearly other settlers there were not as concerned as she was about the rocket fire, and even seemed quite calm in the aftermath, compared to an out of breath and shaky Clarissa Ward who seemed to have trouble gathering her thoughts.
Well, a ditch does make for gripping footage. Perhaps it reminds settlers where they will end up if they keep playing their games, and perhaps that causes them existential dread. Whatever the cause, it’s much more gripping to the audience than filming from inside a car, which is kind of passé in the age of TikTok.
This footage was first purported to be faked by The Quartering, a far-right diarrhea-stream Youtuber that prefers to make things up to bait engagement through anger, rather than actually think about the things he’s commenting on. He shared a video in which a fake voiceover was added suggesting that Clarissa was receiving instructions on how to act for the camera during the rocket salvo.
As if on cue, all of the newspapers above and even the skeptic community jumped to debunk the video. Snopes, Business Insider, Reuters, AP Fact Check, the New York Times and many other legacy outlets jumped in to save Ward’s reputation and exclaim that no, the video was not faked in any way because one way in which it was indeed faked was not true. Even the Daily Mail, who usually doesn’t shy away from a good payday (and has been found guilty of faking quotes for their articles by a court), chose to side with CNN on this one. Even they realized this was a dead-end to follow.
Never mind that CNN was being toured around by an “Israeli” press guide. Never mind that Hamas rockets rarely cause death. Never mind that the Iron Dome, paid for and maintained by the USA, intercepts most of the simpler rockets. Don’t even question why Palestinians in Gaza fire rockets at the settlers occupying their country or why CNN is there getting a tour from the occupier. No, what’s really important is to make a fake video that will be exposed as fake for their Twitter audience.
As always, fakery eventually gets exposed and hurts whatever true point there was to be found — almost as if The Quartering, like many far right figures, had a reason for posting what was pretty blatant fakery and was absolutely going to be exposed as such in the coming days. With that video, he essentially reinforced in the minds of thousands, or perhaps millions, that CNN does good journalism and should be trusted and that he, instead, shouldn’t be trusted.
We will pick a much better angle of attack because there is no need to make evidence up. CNN — and the legacy media in general — doesn’t need to be criticized with fake events when they have a very long history they happily share with us to sink their own reputation.
Who is Clarissa Ward?
Clarissa Ward is CNN’s Chief International Correspondent, which is a mouthful and sounds like a very important job. It has Chief and International in it.
The responsibilities of this job aren’t really public, but it entails reporting from dangerous conflict zones, putting oneself into the line of fire to get the rawest, realest news out there as they’re happening.
It’s a very prestigious job and one that’s sure to garner some fame, so it makes sense that Clarissa gets the choicest pickings. As the Chief correspondent, she certainly is able to pick exactly which stories she wants to cover. Stories of a new dry port being built in Niger or a power plant in Sri Lanka, i.e. infrastructure projects that have a direct material impact improving people’s lives, are better left to the interns and other pawns under Ward.
It becomes very interesting then that even a cursory reading of Ward’s professional history reveals some very interesting coverage. While working as a field producer for Fox News in 2006, she covered the “Israeli”-Lebanese war, the capture of Gilad Shalit (IOF soldier that led to a humiliating prisoner exchange for the occupier), the trial of Saddam Hussein and the 2005 Iraqi constitutional referendum. Later, she followed the US military around in their rampaging in Iraq.
Starting in 2007, she was with ABC News based in Moscow. She happened to be in Georgia at the moment of Russia’s military intervention in the country. In 2010, she was transferred to Beijing. During those three years, she also covered the war in Afghanistan.
From 2012 on, Ward took a special interest in the Syrian civil war — or rather NATO-backed war — in which terrorist groups funded by the US and UK imported foreign fighters to try and topple the Syrian Republic. They finally succeeded in 2024, and of course Ward was among the first to travel to the country to “report” on it.
The connection is that “Israel” is funded by the United States to complete their settler-colonial project, Saddam Hussein was deposed by the United States, Russia has been a big enemy of the US ever since Putin was elected in 1999 (after they realized they would not get him to collaborate), the Syrian civil war was stoked and funded by Western powers, and now China is where the US military is pivoting to, creating a new Cold War against the People’s Republic.
A common thread emerges. It seems that wherever she is based and whatever she reports on, Clarissa Ward always ends up getting the stories that benefit the United States foreign policy agenda.
She hasn’t stopped playing this part at all. Ward joined CNN in 2015 and in 2018 became their new Chief International Correspondent. Quickly, she reported from Taliban Afghanistan — another U.S. enemy. In December 2020, she reported on Navalny (the racist nobody who polled 14% in Russia and faked a poisoning to try and improve his loser numbers) in a joint investigation with Bellingcat.
Bellingcat is an “independent” investigative journalism project that is funded by US and UK intelligence agencies (including the National Endowment for Democracy, a literal CIA front) and, like Clarissa, always end up taking the side of and promoting Western intervention abroad.
In 2022, Ward was deployed to Karkhiv shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine. In 2023, as we mentioned at the beginning, she went to “Israel” to deplore how scary the Resistance rockets were. In 2024, as Syria was toppled by Western-backed foreign rebels (who have already announced they will not fight against “Israel” even as the latter is seizing territory past the Golan Heights and near the capital Damascus), Ward quickly went back to the country — but not to report on the chaos or the uncertainty, but to join the cohort of her imperial journalist peers in deploring just how bad the “Assad regime” was.
In another viral clip, she happens to stumble upon a “prisoner” while visiting a site. The last prisoner in the last cell, emerging just as Clarissa Ward and her crew happen to be present and filming.
And notably, while Clarissa Ward has been learning Arabic since 2005, she speaks to the man in English.
What becomes clear is that Ward knows how to sell a story. Once again, all the ingredients for a once-in-a-lifetime moment are there: the ‘secretive’ prison complex, the mysterious stranger, the chance encounter and the subsequent interview. It’s a much more compelling and gripping story than simply “we visited this old dilapidated building and then we left.”
There’s just one problem.
The photo above shows the moment the prisoner, who claims he had been locked in the dark for three months, looks directly at the sky after coming out of his cell. Eyes get extremely sensitive to light as they adjust to near-darkness conditions, and thus sudden exposure to light can not only be painful but also damaging to the nerves (and daylight, while it seems ambient, is actually much brighter than any light bulb).
In other words, there is no way the prisoner’s story holds up. None of the footage holds up, really. They found him by pure luck huddling under a bunch of blankets and refusing to come out of it until the journalists were there. He easily gets up from his sitting position, despite later apparently requiring to be held by two people to walk out.
The story quickly made worldwide news, even being reported abroad in the foreign media. In my research I found an article from Libération, a French newspaper (and self-proclaimed to be on the left), happily spitting out Clarissa’s version of the story without so much as a fact check.
It becomes even more sordid when we’ve been exposed to footage of actual massacres and torture in Gaza for over a year to try and sell us this obvious plant as a candid chance encounter.
Notably, Clarissa chose to forego the hijab while being taken on a tour of Syria — likely a gesture of goodwill from her guides who were instructed by their backers to project the face of a ‘progressive’ Syria. When she visited Taliban Afghanistan however, where the US is most definitely not welcome, she wore the niqab without complaining (only removing the face cover in front of the camera, as she told it), despite the clothing not being required by law at that time. It seems she preferred to play it safe in Afghanistan, and that this was not a concern for her in Syria — something she would have definitely been briefed on before the trip.
Regardless, there remains one possibility in regards to the Syrian interview: that Ward and her team were being taken through a staged tour of the prison and the prisoner had been planted by her guides. In that way, she would have thought the prisoner was real and not a plant. It’s not really a ‘get out of jail free’ card as it were, as a journalist with her credentials should have realized something was strange about this story and she should have exercised caution in her reporting. In other words, she decided to play along with the story.
On CNN’s Youtube video of the interview, we can read their following pinned comment:
Since this report was published, CNN has continued to look into the background of the prisoner featured in it. CNN is now aware that he may have given a false identity. We are continuing our reporting into this and the wider story. (emphasis mine)
The video is still up however, and one has to scroll down to the comments to see this half-baked excuse from CNN. Additionally, the prisoner’s identity has been verified since then, but CNN has not updated their comment to rectify the record on his actual identity.
According to Verify-Sy, the prisoner’s real identity is Salama Mohammad Salama, first lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force intelligence services. Syrians recognized him on TV and said that he had been implicated thefts, extorsion and attempts to blackmail citizens into becoming informants, earning him a prison sentence.
It destroys the entire narrative surrounding the takeover of Syria. This man was not a poor civilian kidnapped from his home in the dead of night. He was a corrupt official, a criminal who abused his position of authority to enrich himself. He was imprisoned by the very ‘regime’ he worked for.
Or are the new US and Israel-backed terrorists in charge of Syria saying it’s totally fine to be a corrupt official and that we can expect more of this from now on?
After Verify-Sy published the true identity of the perpetrator, the media was quick to distance itself from the story. Libération, who ran a heart-wrenching article on the interview, later somberly asked: was Clarissa Ward tricked? Search engines show a very interesting contradiction as well. Before all outlets (such as AP, the Washington Post and France 24) published Verify-Sy’s report, I clearly remember several articles posting laudatory videos and articles on CNN’s reporting. After his real identity came out however, all one can find on search engines and on these outlets is the fakery being exposed.
They were quick to distance themselves from this blunder that had been called out by the Internet from day one. Regardless, the question remains: why did Ward not ask more questions? Why did CNN release this footage, presenting it as real, without doing more work? In a statement, CNN said that the visit of the prison was not originally planned and happened on the spot. Why was this not reported in the original segment? In other words, we see that even as the news pretends to share unbiased, factual news, they still decide what we hear and what we see. It seems pretty important for the audience to know that the tour of the prison was unplanned and not discussed with the reporting team. But CNN, as the arbiter of all that is true and factual, thought it best to preserve us from knowing such a piece of information.
Poynter was quick to lick the boots of CNN and defend their reputation, writing “Were they [CNN] knowingly deceitful? No, I don’t believe that. […] [J]ournalists are coming to the defense of Ward, who is an outstanding war correspondent.”
Damage control is being done to try and salvage this situation.
Finally, we note that none of the outlets now distancing themselves from Ward’s interview are raising broader questions such as who faked the interview and why they would benefit from it — and more immediately, if other stories coming out of Sednaya might be faked too. The order of the day is that HTS are now the good guys, and so they can’t be questioned. We can only do positive interviews with them. And don’t ask about the beheadings.
These two stories (in Syria and occupied Palestine) aren’t the only two majestic events Ward reported on. It seems that the scoops just have a way of finding her.
While reporting in Somalia (again a country that is being destabilized in civil war with US backing), Ward and her team were reportedly kidnapped by a militia in Sudan. So far so good — plenty of journalists have been kidnapped for ransom or propaganda value over the years. What’s interesting is that Ward was only retained for 48 hours, and never knew the name of the militia that kidnapped her — despite being a reporter with 20 years experience. All they knew was that they were led by a man named “the general” (so basically anyone who has ever led a militia). The militia however was nice enough to call their family back in the US for them and let them know their kidnapped spouses were doing fine and would be released soon — but with the strange threat that they should not talk about it. Then why call them and tell them, unless the whole event was just Clarissa turning her phone off for 48 hours to stage a kidnapping?
Thankfully, she was released unharmed and without so much as a ransom after only two days. Whether her captors decided to ditch her when they learned who she was is still under investigation.
CIA journalism
I would say that between being a wilful tool of the empire and being a self-serving narcissist, Ward certainly strikes me as being more of the latter. But mouthpieces for the CIA embedded in the media are nothing new, and the examples are plenty. The problem is actually proving it on a case-by-case basis. The proof, if it comes out, may take decades — long after the agent has retired or even died — to come to light.
In early 2021, she was among the first foreign journalists to travel to Myanmar to report on the military coup that had succeeded in the country. The coup was not US-backed (at least not that we know as of today), but at the time Myanmar Now, the principal anti-junta news outlet in the country, had been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. Clarissa was aware before going into the country that her trip had been arranged by the junta government and would ultimately be meant to serve them, but she still went.
She was criticized for doing ‘parachute journalism’ and putting at least 11 people she interviewed in danger with the junta. Her presence was not required, as several local journalists in Myanmar (including the aforementioned NED-backed ones) were already reporting from the ground and produced footage that CNN had used in the past. But here’s the kicker: when taking into account NED involvement against the junta government, isn’t it also possible to say that Ward went to the country exactly to get this kind of reporting out? One that would ultimately not serve the coup government, but further manufacture consent for US military intervention in Myanmar to put a more amicable dictator in place (for Washington’s interests)?
We’ve already mentioned Bellingcat and their open funding from the NED. We can also mention the ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (with a name so official it must be serious), who despite being ‘international’ only ever seem to publish reports on the enemies of the United States. They broke the Pandora Papers, a pale copy of the Panama Papers, which notably did not contain any US-based name in them.
Reuters, now a worldwide and trusted news agency, started out as a British government program to relay news in the Arabian peninsula back around the 1920s, right when Britain was active in regime change operations that put the Saud royal family as head of Saudi Arabia.
In the case of Clarissa Ward, information is sparser. We know the networks she’s worked for throughout her career that started in 2006, and we know she’s married to German Count and fund manager Philipp Graf von Bernstorff (yes, he’s a noble, which raises questions). Furthermore, we can look into her lengthy reporting over her 20-year career, but that’s about all we have available at this time.
But other individuals were more openly embedded with intelligence agencies. Edward Hunter was a notable journalist from the Vietnam war era. He reported a lot on the war, and even helped bring the term ‘brainwashing’ to the US (which he claimed was an ancient practice from China, but when Chinese officials heard of the term when meeting with US officials, they had no idea what their interlocutors were saying). After his retirement, it turned out that the prolific Hunter was a CIA agent and had been during his entire career.
The double paycheck must have been nice.
Hunter wasn’t alone, and sometimes journalists don’t need to be directly employed by the CIA. James Reston, the New York Times bureau chief in Washington, admitted to withholding information about U.S. interventions in various countries due to “national security” concerns, showing that he wasn’t really acting ‘freely’.
Recently, Business Insider ran a very flattering portrait on Tom King, writer at DC comics, for starting out as a CIA agent (his cover story when traveling to countries he was meant to destabilize was that of a comic book writer) and then ditching that career so he could focus full time on actually writing comic books. With this interview, Business Insider has started the arduous process of scrubbing King’s past (and likely present too) as a CIA agent. When one tries to look this up online, they will only find the press coverage of his biography, extinguishing all questions about his current allegiance before they ever get off the ground. If he says he left the CIA, then that must be true. Business Insider says so.
The role of the media in class society is not to hold power to account, but to serve as its PR department. Ultimately, these are huge corporations dealing in the market of current events. They’re here to sell a product and make money from it. CNN might be the most blatant example, but all big names eventually turn to serving power whether they want to or not. It’s the only way they can exist. A country such as the United States, who can bomb other states without asking for anyone’s permission, will not suddenly step back from intervening because of the invisible wall of the “free” press. If the government wanted to close down CNN, it could do so at any time. To exist, CNN and other legacy media big names turn to serve power willingly. They get stories to sell, and the state gets its PR in front of the world’s eyeballs.
Whether she is payrolled by the CIA or she simply knows how to chase a good story, Ward is ultimately only a symptom of the situation. Replace her, and someone else will happily do the same job. Liquidate CNN, and another media institution will take up its market share. We must recognize that there is no such thing as the ‘free’ press and that, in fact, abstract ideals of freedom and democracy are fed to us by this same media arm so as to facilitate regime change operations, with Clarissa Ward playing her role in that machinery to serve us the stories of the poor innocent Syrian prisoners rotting away in prison cells because they dared to want equal representation or a different president — something many people in the West are also highly unhappy with, but you don’t see Clarissa reporting on these issues.
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