CNN’s Sanjay Gupta Clarifies Reporting on Surgery in Nepal

By Mark Joyella 

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta appeared on the network’s New Day morning show Wednesday to clarify his reporting from Nepal in the aftermath of the earthquake that 8,000. Gupta said he did perform brain surgery on a child just as he reported in April, but conceded he may have misidentified the patient.

“What has been flagged for me is 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,” he said. “We haven’t independently verified this, but I wanted to provide this update and be very transparent.”

San Francisco-based Global Press Journal raised questions about Gupta’s reporting earlier in the week, traveling to Nepal and interviewing the eight-year-old who was described in CNN reports as the brain surgery patient. The girl’s family insisted she’d had no surgery at all.

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CNN said in a statement that Gupta has “our full and unequivocal support.”

“As we reported, he assisted the surgeons at Bir Hospital by performing a craniotomy on a young victim,” the network said. “Some reporting has suggested it was not the young girl we, at the time of our own reporting in the midst of the crisis, believed her to be. We will try to verify that.”

“Regardless,” CNN said, “Sanjay spent a week in Nepal, helped save a young life in the operating room, and we couldn’t be prouder of him.”

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