Iran’s State TV Airs Apparent Prank Call to C-SPAN to Back False Claims of US Casualties
https://www.voanews.com/middle-east...parent-prank-call-c-span-back-false-claims-us
Iranian state TV has broadcast what appears to be a prank call to a U.S. television network to try to support false Iranian claims of heavy U.S. casualties in an Iranian missile attack on an Iraqi base last week.
Several Iranian diaspora journalists tweeted a video clip of Thursday’s broadcast by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) TV channel, whose presenter, Ali Zohourian, introduced a segment about Washington’s purported “cover-up of heavy losses” from Iran’s January 8 strike on the al-Asad base that houses U.S. and Iraqi forces.
In the IRIB news segment, Zohourian said: “Eight days after the IRGC’s missile slap on the (face of) the United States war machine, a father of a terrorist soldier of America admits in a telephone interview with (C-SPAN’s) Washington Journal (program) that he has no information about his son’s whereabouts since last week, and says his numerous pursuits of U.S. Defense Department officials bore no fruit.”
Maziar Bahari, a journalist with the IranWire news site, was the first to tweet in English and share a clip of the IRIB news segment featuring an excerpt of U.S. TV network C-SPAN’s Washington Journal show. Bahari noted that the man who called in to the C-SPAN show, claiming to be the father of a U.S. soldier who was at the al-Asad base when Iran attacked it,
had a heavy Iranian accent and appeared to be pretending to cry.
“I don’t know if he is alive or he is dead,” the caller said in reference to his purported son, before cursing U.S. President Donald Trump.
Several other Iranian diaspora journalists shared Bahari’s assessment that the phone call to C-SPAN was bogus, including Hadi Nili of BBC Persian and Shayan Sardarizadeh of the BBC Monitoring service.