False: CNN referred to the Texas hostage-taker gunman as 'factually Arab, but morally white.'

An old and doctored image of a CNN broadcast is falsely linked to the recent siege at a synagogue in Texas.A purorted image of a CNN chyron stating the gunman was "factually Arabic, but morally white" is circulated on social media in the backdrop of a ten-hour-long standoff at a synagogue in Texas in January 2022. The attacker has been identified as Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British national who had taken four people as hostages. He died in the shootout with the police. We found the chyron is fake and misrepresented. The fake image has been in circulation for some time and was first published by the satirical conservative media house Babylon Bee in March 2021. The about page of Babylon Bee describes itself as the world's best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims. On checking the original news clip, we find that such a claim did not appear on CNN chyrons. The actual banner televised on CNN read, "Colorado shooting suspect booked into jail today." The dateline in the falsified photo is also cropped to hide the original message, which listed "Boulder Colorado." It is evident that the image is altered. The same fake chyron was circulated back in March 2021, in the aftermath of the shooting in Boulder, Colorado. The Associated Press has fact-checked the same in March 2021 and confirmed that CNN did not publish anything as alleged in the image and that the fake image originated on a satire website.