CNN is fighting back against an Iranian news outlet’s claims that it fabricated portions of Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani by posting the raw video of the interview with an accompanying transcript.
Amanpour spoke with Rouhani during his visit to the United States for the United Nations general assembly in an interview that aired on CNN International on Wednesday. Based on excerpts of the interview posted online, Fars News Agency claimed that CNN had “added to or changed parts of his remarks when Christiane Amanpour asked him about the Holocaust.”
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Fars placed an “exact Farsi transcript” on its page with its own English translation, comparing it what aired on CNN. Fars noted that CNN added the word “Holocaust” and also sentences that specifically condemned the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews and the Jews’ treatment of Palestinians in Israel now.
A spokeswoman at CNN told TheWrap that Rouhani’s translator was hired by the Iranian government. To prove that it fabricated nothing, CNN also posted raw video of the interview with a transcript on Wednesday night for viewers to see for themselves. Unlike the version of the interview that aired on CNN International, this one has the voice of the actual translator as she translates Rouhani’s words into English. (In the television version, the translator’s voice was dubbed with man’s to match the gender of the speaker.)
Though the Washington Free Beacon called Fars a “government-run” news service and Washington Post said it’s “semi-official,” Fars calls itself “Iran’s leading independent news agency.” One thing is for sure: Fars is the same news outlet that once lifted an entire article from The Onion and reported it as fact.