Is it true that CNN in its tweet passed off a hotel in Serbia as a destroyed Ukrainian hotel?

In March 2022, Russian media and Internet users suspected a major American television channel of spreading fake news. We have verified the validity of such accusations.

March 22, 2022 on the air of the Russia 24 TV channel showed a story about “unique fake content” from the American television channel CNN: “The footage allegedly shows the Ukrainian Mir Hotel, destroyed by Russian shells. As it turned out, this is one of the buildings of the Serbian resort Zvonačka Banja. The drawing on the wall speaks about this. But the building is actually under reconstruction, that’s why it’s in this condition.” A day earlier, their overseas colleagues accused in disinformation and Channel Five, criticizing a tweet allegedly posted on the CNN account.

During the same days, CNN was also criticized by social media users. A screenshot of a tweet allegedly published by the TV channel was posted by quite large public pages on VKontakte, including "Turned by War" (about 180,000 subscribers at the time of writing), "Serbia | Voice of Serbia | Life in Serbia" (almost 120,000) and official page publicist Nikolai Starikov (about 230,000). Similar posts were posted by users of other social networks, for example Twitter.

The statement that the hotel shown in the photograph is located not in Ukraine, but in Serbia, is true. This hotel is actually located in the town of Zvonachka Banya, and the image used in the screenshot was taken no later than 2010 - then the picture posted in a publication about how the hotel fell into disrepair. There is also a video dedicated to the Serbian Hotel Mir, published on YouTube in the summer of 2020.

Now let's see if CNN really published this tweet.

When searching on Twitter we failed find posts posted by an account @cnnbrk and containing the hashtag #StandingWithUkraine. Didn't write in this account and about the “Ukrainian Hotel Mir”. One might assume that such a tweet was actually posted and then deleted, but in that case the entry would have been saved in the Google cache (where we also not found no traces). German fact checkers from the Correctiv project not found Similar tweets were posted on other CNN accounts. There is no news about the destroyed Ukrainian hotel on the TV channel’s website either.

The design of the tweet shown in the screenshot is also indicative. Firstly, the text contains spelling errors, which are extremely uncharacteristic for such a large publication (at least the words Ukrainian and Russian are written in English with a capital letter). Secondly, posts on the @cnnbrk Twitter account traditionally consist of short text without emojis or hashtags, as well as attachments - pictures and captions, which together form a link to the material on the CNN website. Thirdly, in the original design of the social network, such pictures have rounded corners, while the screenshot shows an image with right corners and no caption. A classic CNN Breaking News tweet looks like this:

Our fellow fact checkers from different countries contacted the TV channel for comments. CNN communications director Bridget Leininger, as well as other representatives of this media, responded to Politifact, USA Today, AFP, Reuters, CheckYourFact and other publications stated that the tweet was fabricated and CNN had never published such a post on its social networks.

It is no coincidence that the screenshot of the alleged CNN tweet in the upper right corner mentions someone named Mike Mykonski. Like back in early March found out Serbian publication Raskrikavanje, under this pseudonym local resident Milorad Uskovic is hiding. In his homeland, he became famous for publishing fictitious or satirical news, which he posts on his Instagram* along with edited pictures. Raskrikavanje provides a screenshot of one of these posts, which uses the same “CNN tweet” (the @majk_majkonski profile is currently unavailable).

Although it was the screenshot with the edited CNN tweet that gained the most popularity, Rossiya-24 also showed a video recording from an allegedly destroyed Ukrainian hotel. The footage was accompanied by a comment from the announcer: “Foreign publications, in particular CNN, continue to post unique fake content.” In fact, the video was taken from the anonymous Telegram channel “Balkan Gossip” (about 26,500 subscribers at the time of writing this text). March 21 in it appeared an entry exposing a “mistake” on CNN’s Twitter (the author analyzed the same screenshot marked “Mike Mykonski”). We were unable to find a similar video on the CNN website and social networks where a Serbian hotel was passed off as a Ukrainian one.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Reuters. Fact Check-An image of a Serbian hotel wrongly captioned as being in Ukraine was not tweeted by CNN
2. PolitiFact. Viral Image: CNN tweeted a picture of a Serbian resort and said it was in Ukraine
3. Raskrivanje. Lažne vesti o lažnim vestima: Fabrikovanje nepostojećih CNN tax
4. Correctiv. CNN-Tweet über ein zerstörtes Hotel in der Ukraine ist gefälscht
5. USA Today. Fact check: Fabricated tweet used to wrongly accuse CNN of misreporting in Ukraine war
6. AFP Fact Check. Fake CNN tweet shared in posts accusing broadcaster of fabricating 'Ukraine bomb' story