Wiith suspicious timing, a CNN camera crew team, led by Drew Griffin, rescued a Beaumont-area flood victim from a floating truck, positioned right behind the camera. The reporter and his team dropped their camera stand-up work and apparently ran to rescue the man from the submerged vehicle, making themselves heroes, all the more so because the victim this time explicitly stated that they saved his lives. Business Insider reports :

After getting egg all over its face from an angry Houston-area flood victim who didn't like a microphone stuck in her face, CNN seems to be resorting to increasingly desperate tactics, venturing possibly into fake news.

A CNN crew rescued a man who accidentally drove his truck into a flooded ditch in Beaumont, Texas, on Wednesday. "We just literally rescued this guy out," Drew Griffin, a CNN correspondent, said on-camera after the dramatic rescue. "This man just accidentally drove into a ravine that looked like a road." "And his truck just went in, and it's now going down that ravine," he said. "It happens within seconds." Griffin was reporting on Hurricane Harvey in the southeastern Texas town, 85 miles west of Houston, when the crew spotted a white pickup truck enter what looked like a street covered in water but was actually a flooded drainage ditch. Griffin called out to the driver as the truck began to float away. Using a rope they had on hand, the crew members were able to pull the man out from the vehicle and bring him to dry land. "There was no time to call 911," Griffin said, adding that "there was no way they were going to get here in time."

Great timing indeed. One wonders if, as Sharyl Attkisson described the dynamic, a directive was sent from above to make just such a rescue. Or if CNN planted its stand-up shot knowing the area behind it was ready-made for a hapless driver to come rescue. Something about the timing of that perfectly staged heroism in the wake of the public relations disaster a couple days earlier makes one wonder if that could have been for real.

After all, the president of the United States has argued that CNN is fake news and if anything at all was staged in this perfectly timed event, it would make it fake news, much as photographers during the Vietnam War used to shift bodies around for more dramatic news pictures.

Maybe it really was just a lucky coincidence for CNN.

On the other hand, there is one element that doesn't come off as entirely honest - blogger Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has pointed out that Griffin, the reporter, did seem to change his pants as he ran to the rescue.

It's entirely possible he did change his pants to something more suitable for a water rescue while the camera was focused on the sign, and it's also possible he did it quickly, much as stage actors can do. But once again, it sure looks like a lucky coincidence.

We will undoubtedly hear more about this as bloggers get on the case, finding out if it was real or if it was staged. But with more than one strike against them, it shouldn't be discounted. It shows the increasing desperation of CNN in the face of falling ratings and presidential opprobrium as it continuously gets caught out for fake news. Does anyone really think CNN would be incapable of staging a little news?