LONDON: Fact-checkers for the Associated Press have refuted claims that CNN staged a news report in which its correspondent and her team sheltered in a ditch near the Israel-Gaza border during a rocket attack.
The edited video shows Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, and her team take cover in a ditch as rockets explode nearby. A man’s voice, which sounds as though it is coming from a phone, gives instructions including, “Try and look nice and scared,” and “Can you boost the volume on those explosions, please?”
Some social media users cited the audio in the edited video as proof that the CNN team was being directed by someone off screen. Calling the claims “false,” AP’s fact-checkers said the original, unaltered audio in the actual report was of a correspondent for the network describing the attack as it happened.
“CNN EXPOSED FOR FAKING AN ATTACK IN ISRAEL,” read one post on social media platform X, which included the altered footage. That post had received approximately 35,100 likes and more than 19,200 shares as of Thursday.
While the audio in the video being shared online was altered, the footage itself is real, AP said.
Emily Kuhn, a CNN spokesperson, wrote in an email to AP that the audio “is fabricated, inaccurate and irresponsibly distorts the reality of the moment that was covered live on CNN.” She added that people should watch the real CNN report “in full for themselves on a trusted platform.”
In the actual report, Ward explained that she and her team had taken cover due to “a massive barrage of rockets” that they could then hear being intercepted by the Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system. Once it is safe, Ward shows viewers the area where Hamas launched a deadly incursion into southern Israeli towns on Saturday, igniting the current conflict, and gives an overview of what happened that day.
* With AP
