Media amplified fabricated torture claims about the hostages

Evidence

Yet not even the fifty-two themselves went so far as to say that they had been tortured or systematically brutalized: this emerges in the transcript of their news conference at West Point (see the New York Times, January 28), where Elizabeth Swift says quite explicitly that Newsweek lied about what she said, inventing a story about torture (much amplified by the media) that had nothing to do with the facts. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 90

Categorization

• CANDY: A concrete, verifiable case of a major news outlet inventing an atrocity story that the victim denied — good elevator-conversation material.