Rieder: Syria story means more trouble for NBC

The last thing NBC News needs is another serious problem. But it looks like it's got one.

It's bad enough that the network has to figure out what to do about its star anchor Brian Williams, enmeshed in a controversy over embellishing his exploits.

Now it has to deal with an ugly situation in which it seems its executives allowed star foreign correspondent Richard Engel to go on the air with a story they had reason to believe was wrong.

About his own kidnapping, no less.

The saga goes back to December 2012, when Engel and five members of his reporting team were abducted by armed gunmen in Syria. After they were released, Engel reported that the kidnappers were Shiite militiamen loyal to the embattled government of President Basher Assad. That, Engel says, is how the gunmen identified themselves.

But recently The New York Times began digging into the episode and concluded that, quite to the contrary, Engel and his crew were "almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr. Assad."

After they were contacted by the Times about a month ago, Engel and NBC investigated. On Wednesday night, Engel posted a dispatch in which he acknowledged he had been wrong. The kidnappers, it turns out, had been Sunnis — not Shiites linked to the government — who had put on an elaborate ruse to disguise their identity. And the group that "rescued" Engel & Co. were linked to the group that had staged the abduction.

No one is suggesting Engel intentionally distorted the situation. That's not NBC's problem.

The Times reports that the kidnappers were part of a group called the North Idlib Falcons Brigade led by two men named Azzo Qassab and Shukri Ajouj. And here's where things get very dicey indeed for NBC.

"NBC executives were informed of Mr. Ajouj and Mr. Qassab's possible involvement during and after Mr. Engels' captivity, according to current and former NBC employees and others who helped search for Mr. Engel, including political activists and security professionals," the Times says.

The story goes on to say, "NBC's own assessment during the kidnapping had focused on Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj, according to a half-dozen people involved in the recovery effort. NBC had received GPS data from the team's emergency beacon that showed it had been held early in the abduction at a chicken farm widely known by local residents and other rebels to be controlled by the Sunni criminal group."

That means — if the Times' account is true, and there seems no reason to doubt it — that NBC allowed Engel to go on the air and repeatedly assert that the forces of Assad had done the deed, when its execs knew full well that didn't seem to be the case.

That's simply inexcusable.

What's worse, the network so far is stonewalling. Yes, Engel came forward and commendably set the record straight. Yet NBC won't deal with what it knew, when it knew it and why it acted like it did. The Times reports that NBC said it would have nothing to say beyond Engel's post.

Making NBC's behavior even worse is the context in which the erroneous report took place, as Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame argues forcefully in The Intercept.

At the time, Assad was widely seen as the evil dictator under siege from Arab Spring-like rebels, many of them "moderates," perhaps some of them pro-Western. There was sentiment that the U.S. should intervene on the side of the anti-Assad forces.

Engel's account fit in neatly with the narrative of the moment. It would have been a very different story if it were known that the kidnappers were Sunnis, not Assad's thugs, and that this bunch of rebels was largely a criminal band with shifting alliances, not noble freedom-seekers.

Make no mistake, this is a big deal. Props to The New York Times for its digging, and to Engel for taking the challenge seriously and correcting the record.

Now it's time for NBC to knock down the stonewall and come clean about just what happened.

After the Williams scandal erupted, NBC brought back Andrew Lack to take over the news operation and clean things up.

Mr. Lack, your move.