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CNN’s recent report in Damascus by Clarissa Ward deserves an award. But not a press award for its astute journalism, more of a Hollywood one for its almost comical parody. Mark Thompson, CNN’s new British CEO might be disturbed by Ward’s hilarious reportage as it not only comes across as fake, but as it transpires later, it stank of just mere amateurism. The new boss at Atlanta has his work cut out trying to bring back ratings to a network which has been a victim of its success from its former glory years. The bigger you are, the harder you fall, he might argue. What this Irishman, who calls himself a Brit, needs is a bit of the old luck associated with the emerald Isle.

Where was the tipping point for CNN which now no longer has any credibility as a decent news outlet on the world stage, it once had in the early days? And what is at the core which has led to now millions of humble people on social media being so attuned to its news reports which are so obviously faked? When watching Ward’s piece on the prisoner – who turned out to be an ex intel officer who was banged up due to a vendetta carried out against him by a senior officer – one is left with a dilemma. Are you disappointed by the fact that you are being lied to by a media outlet which is going to such extraordinary lengths to continue Israel’s fake news strategy? Or are you vexed, perhaps as journalists, at how amateur and clumsy the last minute amdram work is, like watching out takes of a British comedy show of soldiers singing on a stage to entertain battle weary soldiers of the British empire? Some mothers really do ‘ave ‘em, he might mutter to himself after watching Ward’s report but for sure our man will have thought also of 90s TV parody mock news show The Day Today which had one actress playing Barbara Wintergreen, an American reporter working for a network called CBN – sketches which mocked American style reporting and how contrived and corrupted its final version was.

Thompson has a real problem at CNN. He is learning after one year or so in the job that trying to rebuild credibility is very hard, even in the fatuous, almost satirical world of international news. Thompson’s biggest problem is that CNN has become so bad, that it has actually become parody or satire. Barbara Wintergreen has literally returned to our screens at Ward. CNN has become a joke and is becoming a liability for its paying masters. Decades of internal corruption coupled with a bigger geopolitical agenda which includes serving Israel’s interests have led to this cancer spreading so far, so quickly.

Ward herself has a terrible reputation for her on-screen drama. But who could blame her when the amateurism and fakery has been so well established for her? There are just too many examples of CNN staging the news in the most shameful theatrical way in recent months in Gaza just to make the point. But a recent report which centred on a work roster, written in Arabic and posted on the wall of a Gaza hospital, should have been a warning to all of us who the real powers are at CNN and what the game is. Fake news on a scale which we haven’t seen before. Indeed, it may well be that Israel and its lobby are patting themselves on the back for making CNN the world leader in fake news. The report of the Gaza hospital was shocking in that even the local CNN Palestinian fixer translated the paper for the journalist Nic Robertson who chose to accept the ludicrous claims of the IDF soldier in preference to the simple axiomatic truth under his nose.

There are just too many of these examples to list. Interns are resigning and exposing them like Ana Maria Monjardino in this excellent piece which should worry Thompson. Other big media outlets are actually feasting on CNN’s dirty work and exposing it for hundreds of millions to see for themselves, like Al Jazeera’s excellent documentary Failing Gaza: Pro-Israel bias uncovered behind the lens of Western media.

The real problem of Thompson is the extent of the rot and how corruption internally drives an agenda which encourages journalists of all ages and calibre to pump out these shocking lies on an hourly basis. In a nutshell, it is a culture.

I experienced it firsthand in 2011 when I worked for CNN as a freelance journalist and producer just how even CNN’s own staff had an almost cultish following for this and, in private, an absolute revulsion of the craft of journalism and its tenets.

In Morocco I was threatened over the telephone by CNN’s international editor, a Palestinian Christian – who, with bottom quivering lip and whispering into her mouthpiece of her telephone told me that if I complained about the lack of ethics or professionalism once more to other CNN employees, she would personally “destroy” me.

She kept her word. After the threat she tolerated me one more time with an abysmal display of office corruption by helping her Jewish friend Elise Labott – a producer at that time – to come to Morocco in 2011 and make a news package, entirely for the purposes of showcasing her work to CNN bosses so as to gain promotion to become a journalist. Labott was hopelessly underqualified to make a report about Morocco and relied on pillow talk bigotry from an UAE diplomat living in Rabat who convinced her that the Moroccan king was “clinging on to power”. Watching her crash and burn on an hourly basis was like watching your five-year old try to configure your smart TV. Not overburdened with neither intelligence nor any real skill-set, Labott was a spoof journalist who you couldn’t imagine ever being let out of the office to even cover a FEMEN boobs out photo op demo. Labott redefined the word ‘useless’.

She was to journalism what Ryanair is to luxury travel, what a Status Quo cover band is to haut couture. She was as suited or as comfortable with journalism as a reggae band at a KKK convention.

But this is CNN where dreams can come true. Her ineptitude was literally the antithesis of journalism in the form of a bellowing New York Jewish monster from the black lagoon. But Elise had one trick up her sleeve. She arrived in Morocco with the story already written and while I had to wind down the window of my car to try and quell her 12 decibel brawl which I feared might damage my eardrums, she, in her enthusiasm managed to break in half the door handle of my beloved beemah. In two pieces.

Labott shocked me over many days. Her record-breaking amateurism and rank zeal to not only get the job done but to pack as many lies into the report as possible, was impressive. A group of riot police mooching about chatting among themselves while a few hundred ‘protestors’ in Casablanca stood within a meter of them during a pause was an opportunity to film police brutality. She wanted me to make the police move so that I could film some ‘action’ and make it look like third world police attacking those standing for democracy. You know the sort of thing. This was trumped by a stunt the following day which was so unethical, I had to call the nephew of CNN’s boss Tony Maddox and report it. Labott was so desperate to show that she had come journalistic credibility that she stole, wholesale, an article from me which she put her name to on the CNN website. I complained. It was taken down. But no one at Atlanta was shocked. Was this normal?

The outstanding moment which rests with me to this day is not how deceitful the CNN lawyers were to me – they lied of course – after they finally agreed to investigate my allegations against her for unethical journalistic practice. It was not even the speed at which Labott had me fired when I refused point blank to do the “king Mohamed clinging onto power line” in the report. It was really her brazen lack of any professional shame for completely making up an entire narrative in a report and hoping to fake it with creative camerawork – and perhaps even more her response.

She simply explained to me that all the giants at CNN – including Christiane Amanpour, Anderson Cooper and CNN’s then VP Parisa Khosravi “all made up their reports when they travelled outside of the U.S.” and that I was somewhat naïve not to understand this.

It’s the corruption internally which protects those stars of course from any fact checking and disciplinary actions. This also was remarkable about Labott who, to my reckoning, was investigated three times at CNN for unethical reporting – largely, I would assume, as she was a fledgling and not important enough to leave alone. Her tawdry approach to help Hillary Clinton was finally her downfall and probably embarrassed the stars there although it was CNN bosses who initially sent her to Israel – following my case and her one and only Morocco report which trashed the king and lied about the Marrakech bomb, linking it to Al Qaeda when she knew there was no evidence whatsoever to substantiate such a wild claim. It seems at CNN if you lie well and serve Israel’s interests, there is only one way the network can take you, even if you are so useless you can’t even get dressed in the morning without help from a neighbour.

Naturally Labott was promoted and got her dream job as a journalist.

But was she protected by Israel? Impossible to say but her final departure was extremely low key with only one member of CNN’s vast team of presenters and journalists wishing her good luck as she left Atlanta, Wolf Blitzer, also a Zionist. Labott was literally the shining example of how far a joke can be taken, someone of such poor journalist ability it makes those around her pity her rank ineptitude. The point is that there is no fact checking at CNN as this goes against the cosy internal political working practice. If there were, Labott would never made it as a journalist and the stars who have on-screen presence would be forced to occasionally look at the odd fact that is chucked their way. Of course many will still blunder on with their sensational ignorance like the buffoonish Ben-get-me-outtah-here-im-so-shit Wedeman who, wait for it, during a live piece to camera during the days following the Beirut port bomb referred to the port as southwest to his own location in the centre of Beirut (it was northeast) and also stated that nearly all of Lebanon’s debt was “foreign”. Du’er. Wrong again Ben. It was domestic. Try harder.

The standard of on-screen reporting is brain dead deplorable. You might as well recruit your journos from the poorest neighbourhoods in white trash small towns where people’s level of education is limited to just a few hundred words in English and their knowledge of the world comes from the Simpsons. Oh wait, that’s what Atlanta does.

It’s so bad that it encourages the truly hopeless like Labott to come to the fore.

The Labott episode made me think a lot over the years. Could she have been right in her defence? Is everything that CNN does around the world basically to serve Israel’s agenda? Surely by now Mark Thompson must be realising that the kind of internal corruption which protected, nay encouraged Labott for so long to make fake news reports for Israel must be looked at in context. Ward’s reports have no credibility whatsoever as the world has woken up to what CNN is. Deplorably amateur at best, wicked propaganda at worse. Thompson will need more than Irish luck to give it any credibility. He will need a miracle as it’s only a matter of time now that the spoofed videos get more traffic than the real ones. It’s only a matter of time before Hollywood bangs the last nail in the coffin with a spoof movie about its so-called reporters working in the war zones. Think Tropic Thunder with Alec Baldwin playing a middle aged Ben–where-the-fuck-am-I Wedeman whose rounded torso is draped in Khaki jacket with the extra large pockets, walking around a Middle Eastern capital, lost, unable to get back to his own hotel without a team of fixers sent for him. Or Clarissa Ward played by Julia Roberts dropping to the floor when the fixer’s mobile phone gets a notification. I wonder who would play the hapless Labott?