WHAT ELSE IS CNN HIDING?
By Yale Kramer
April 11, 2003
In Friday’s New York Times Eason Jordan , CNN’s chief news executive, wrote an op-ed piece that must surely be a prime candidate for Horsefeathers’ Moral Idiocy Award in the Journalism department. He tells with a mixture of pride and self-pity how pained he was for having to deceive CNN’s world-wide audience for twelve years about how bad the Saddam regime really was.
He tells of knowing about assassinations, inhuman brutality, pervasive terror on a par with Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, but not breathing a word about this to the world at large. He visited Baghdad thirteen times. “Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard—awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqi, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.”
Instead of closing down the Bureau, he and the rest of the journalists at CNN decided that it was better to go on broadcasting to the world a fairy tale about Iraq. Making us think that Iraq was just another misguided little Arab country that doesn’t know any better. I’ve heard Big Lies before but this makes Goebbels look like a rank amateur.
Jordan’s ridiculous rationalization for not telling the truth about what kind of regime Iraq really was—that he wanted to protect the staff safety—wouldn’t pass muster with anyone with a shred of journalistic responsibility. All he had to do to make them safe was to fire them and close the Bureau, and then assign one or two individual reporters to keep their ears open for a couple of years and then come home and write their story—the true story of the regime.
What possible journalistic value could broadcasting half-truths, lies, varnished news have? The net result is that CNN succeeded not in informing its public but dis-informing it. CNN’s stupid policy of news access at all costs even if it’s not news has dealt its own credibility a serious blow. What else can you do except to wonder what else they are keeping to themselves.
This episode has won a place in my museum of How Governments Suborn Journalists.
Here in America, the State corrupts journalists by addicting them to "leaks," stories from "unidentified senior administration officials," press releases from government public relations offices, and that staple of journalistic fodder, the government press conference. These things weaken the journalist's "occupational muscles," thus inducing in him both dependence on these biased "sources" and a distaste for the hard work of true investigative reporting. Other countries use other tactics. Apparently the Iraqi tactic was in keeping with its general attitude toward power: terrify 'em into acquiescence.
The sole conceivable excuse for CNN's behavior is that it feared that, if it were to begin shutdown operations, its personnel would be seized and killed before they could exit the country. Is there any possibility that that was the case?
Posted by: Francis W. Porretto on April 12, 2003 07:38 AMThey didn't have to shut down operations. All they had to do was stop their begging trips to the Iraqi government (of which Jordan says he made 12), and the regime would have thrown them out. No more employees at risk, no more complicity with the regime.
Posted by: David Foster on April 13, 2003 06:49 PMAt the same time they were laying suck-up to this Hitler wannabe, they were lying about the only open democracy in the Middle East, Israel.
Posted by: Al Thompson on April 14, 2003 02:22 PMCNN REPORTED ON A "MASSACRE" IN JENIN. WAS JORDAN WORRIED ABOUT HAMAS AND HEZBOLLAH CONTACTS WHO WERE PROTECTING CNN REPORTERS?
Posted by: RUTH KING on April 14, 2003 04:27 PMI read a great response column to this story. It was from a old-time Chicago reporter (my town!), who said that when this type of article would show up in a Chicago paper, it was time to start digging cause they were hiding something even more despicable. Let's hope the digging has begun.
Posted by: Ilona on April 14, 2003 06:38 PMThis Op-ed piece, at this time, in that yellow rag, is strictly a diversionary tactic in the war against the truth.