A controversy with more shades to it, or just erroneous reporting?
AB Wire
NEW YORK: Neurosurgeon and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is facing charges of fabricating a story about a girl he operated upon in Nepal, which seems also to be a case of erroneous reporting by Gupta in the face of chaos and tumult following the devastating earthquakes in Nepal, which he covered.
The matter came to light on the CNN program “New Day” two days ago, when Gupta revealed that a girl he thought he operated on and was eight years old, was in fact a 14-year-old girl.
“This girl that we reported on was an eight-year-old girl at that time that I was asked to perform an operation on,” said Gupta in the segment. “The understanding was she had a blood clot on the brain that need to be removed because that can cause swelling in the brain. What has been flagged for us now, Chris, is in fact that the patient that I operated on may not have been this eight-year-old girl, but rather a 14-year-old girl in that same hospital during that immediate aftermath of the earthquake. ”
The error in Gupta’s reportage was uncovered by a journalist in the Global Press Journal, Shilu Manandhar, under the title “CNN Falsely Claims Dr. Sanjay Gupta Performed Brain Surgery on 8-Year-Old Quake Victim in Nepal.”
The Washington Post reported the 8-year-old quake victim is named Salina Dahal, and according to Gupta’s televised report, she was in tough shape.
“I met 8-year-old Salina yesterday, her grandfather driving over a day to get to this hospital after the family’s home collapsed on her. As a practicing neurosurgeon, I assisted in an operation to remove a blood clot from the top of her brain and relieve swelling,” said Gupta on the April 28 edition of “New Day.” “The conditions and equipment available to us a bit primitive, much like what you’d find in a war zone. But the operation was a success. Salina is alive, her prognosis is good.”
Not the case, Manandhar contends. Salina sustained a broken wrist and some wounds to her head, though nothing that would require brain surgery. “No, she hasn’t been operated,” Ram Prasad Dahal, her grandfather, told Global Press Journal, reported the Post. Instead of operating on Salina, Gupta actually operated on another earthquake victim, 14-year-old Sandhya Chalise, according to the report.
The fascinating twist to this story relates to CNN’s original take, which featured what Global Press Journal identifies as the correct patient. A piece posted on CNN.com under the byline of Tim Hume furnished scene reporting on the crush of patients at Bir Hospital and indicated that Gupta had operated on Sandhya, while also mentioning Salina’s less-urgent predicament. Yet that version of the story wasn’t allowed to stand, thanks to the intervention of the the network’s chief medical correspondent. “I wanted to get the story right,” Gupta told NPR’s David Folkenflik. “I didn’t think the story was right. I had every reason to believe based on the [CAT] scans, based on what the doctors were telling me, based on the story they had told me, that the patient we had just operated on was an 8-year-old girl.”
CNN says it will investigate Gupta’s claims, it said in a statement.
“Questions have arisen about the identity of the girl who Dr. Sanjay Gupta helped operate on during a week in Nepal in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. CNN is looking into those questions and will update our coverage as warranted. Gupta helped doctors at Bir Hospital in Kathmandu perform a craniotomy in a makeshift operating room on a young patient as described in this story; it is the identity of the patient that is in question.”
In an interview to NPR, Gupta reiterated that he doesn’t like to “make mistakes.”
“Sometimes you are beholden to other people for information, or you are verifying details in other ways. It gives me pause as a doctor. It gives me pause as a journalist.” The mistake, Gupta said, was one born of havoc. “We want to be accurate, 100 percent. It was a chaotic situation, no doubt. You had a hospital turn into a massive triage area.”
Not good enough, argued Cristi Hegranes, the founder and executive director of the San Francisco-based Global Press Institute and the publisher of the Global Press Journal.
“When foreign correspondents are parachuted into a place where they have no social, historical, cultural or political context, the coverage is automatically compromised,” says Hegranes, herself a former stringer in Nepal. “Accuracy is not the top priority.”
The question some are asking, especially after the Brian Williams scandal at NBC, is does Gupta have other skeletons in his closet; will other such cases surface that may embarrass him and CNN?