How CNN helped spread a hoax about Syrian babies dying in incubators

"... In this hazy situation created by Syria’s exclusion of international media, different parties can try to seek advantage in the propaganda war. False reports and hoaxes make it much harder to get people to take real crimes seriously.

Last night, I received this image by Twitter. It can also be found on numerous Arabic-language forums, particularly based in the Gulf...:

URGENT: Syria | The electricity was cut today from the city of Hama, and the outage included the hospitals. Following this, the Shabiha [state militia] deliberately destroyed the electricity generators in the hospitals which led to the deaths of all the premature babies (more than 40 in a single hospital).

On its face, the report is hyperbolic and not very credible, though it appears to be believable enough that many people circulated it in good faith. But even the most brutal regimes don’t tend to deliberately destroy generators at hospitals... Moreover why haven’t any of the major human rights organizations monitoring events in Syria including Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International raised the alarm?

On 7 August, CNN carried a story headlined, “Rights group: 8 babies die after power cut to Syrian hospital”:

(CNN) — A Syrian human rights group says eight premature infants dependent on incubators died after authorities cut power to a hospital in the embattled city of Hama as part of a renewed crackdown on anti-government demonstrators calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s reign. The babies died at Hurani Hospital in the northwest Syrian city on Wednesday, Rami Abdul-Rahman, president of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Sunday. Abdul-Rahman cited information provided by a hospital employee ... 

The picture circulating with many of the alarmist report of dozens of dead babies in Syria, you will be glad to know, shows a bunch of babies who are alive, hopefully well, and living in Egypt..."

The image apparently first appeared on the website of the Egyptian newspaper al-Badil al-Jadid in two stories on 6 April and 7 April about overcrowding and poor conditions in the maternity ward of the al-Shabti hospital in Alexandria.