He can get a job with Rolling Stone, it also gathers no facts.
Via IJR
NBC News has altered its original account of the kidnapping of chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and two others by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2012. Additionally, Engel now admits that, contrary to his prior claim, he had no proof of “one of his captors lying dead” when the news crew was rescued.
As reported by The New York Times, NBC changed its story on Wednesday:
NBC News on Wednesday revised its account of the 2012 kidnapping of its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, saying it was likely that Mr. Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by a Sunni militant group, not forces affiliated with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
Interviews by The Times with several dozen people – including many of those involved in the search for NBC’s team, rebel fighters and activists in Syria and current and former NBC News employees – suggested that Mr. Engel’s team was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr. Assad.
Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent for CNN and host of “Reliable Sources,” tweeted his concerns about The New York Times’ story and NBC’s original account.[…]
Saying he did not have a “definitive account of what happened that night,” Engel responded on Wednesday:
“Producer Aziz Akyavas [one of the two other abductees] climbed out of the van through the driver-side door. He says he saw and stepped over a body that lay by the front wheel. I climbed out of the passenger side door.
Under the circumstances, and especially since Aziz said that he had seen and stepped over a body, I didn’t doubt it and later reported it as fact.”
This story is significant in the respect that ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups are Sunni, whereas Assad is a member of the Alawites, a sect that identifies as Shiite.