Posted on 04/15/2003 12:03:00 PM PDT by Mr. Mulliner
CNN's Jordan Defends Self; CNN Refuses to
Let U.S. Use Its NewsCNN chief news executive Eason Jordan sent a memo to his staff on Monday reacting to criticism of him for withholding from CNN viewers information he had about Saddam Hussein's brutality, a confession he made in a Friday New York Times op-ed. "Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin," Jordan insisted in the memo reported in Tuesday's Washington Post by Lisa de Moraes.
Jordan wrote: "Some critics say if I had told my Iraq horror stories sooner, I would have saved thousands of lives." Jordan countered: "How they come to that conclusion I don't know. Iraq's human rights record and the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime were well known before I wrote my op-ed piece. The only sure thing that would have happened if I told those stories sooner is the regime would have tracked down and killed the innocent people who told me those stories."
But specific, powerful anecdotes detailing the kinds of incidents which Jordan knew about -- fingernails and teeth pulled out, kidnapings, murder for saying the wrong thing, assassination efforts against leaders of other nations -- were not part of pre-war coverage on any network.
Meanwhile, Monday night on FNC the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes declared that given what he knew, “CNN presented for years a distorted, false picture of Iraq.”
Brit Hume marveled, as taken down by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth: “Well, one thing that’s interesting in context with that election, because of the things that Eason Jordan wrote in the piece in the New York Times on Friday was that he had even been confided in by senior Iraqi officials who told him that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and he really had to go. So, at that point, one would think Eason Jordan, at least, knew that the vote could, would probably, had been at least 10,998,998 to 2, or something, that there were people in there that didn’t love him, and that, so the straight-faced coverage of the election, which CNN now, they’re not the only news organization that was a little straight-faced about that election, but for them to do it knowing what executives knew, it strikes me as something to behold, isn’t it?”
Jeffrey Birnbaum, Washington Bureau Chief for Time-Warner owned Fortune magazine, agreed and chided Jordan: “Yeah, it seems completely wrong that CNN or any news organization would work so hard to have a bureau in a foreign capital only to suppress the information that, not just the bureau, but the top news-gathering executive knows about that country.”
Plus, in the midst of all of this, OpinionJournal.com's “Best of the Web” column (www.opinionjournal.com/best) noticed that CNN refused to have its news included in the U.S. government's new TV channel for Iraq, insisting it's an “independent” news operation. In the April 11 Washington Post, Mike Allen reported deep in story about the launch of the channel: “CNN declined to have its newscasts included. 'As an independent, global news organization, we did not think it was appropriate to participate in a U.S. government transmission,' spokeswoman Christa Robinson said.” See the article as posted on www.washingtonpost.com.
And “Best of the Web” author James Taranto picked up the gem that four years ago Jordan complained about how the U.S. government was an impediment to CNN getting a bureau in Baghdad. From the May 7, 1999 Atlanta Business Chronicle:
"'The government we have the toughest time with is the U.S. government,' said Eason Jordan, CNN's president for global newsgathering, at the network's annual World Report Conference May 4.
“Because of trade embargoes, the U.S. government is involved in where CNN opens its bureaus, Jordan said. CNN has been trying for a year to open a permanent bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, and now has permission from the Iraqis, he said. 'I've [recently] been thrown out of the White House pleading this case.'
“CNN has had a reporter in Iraq for most of the past year, 'a bureau in all but name,' Jordan said, but he is not giving up his fight. After a longer battle, the U.S. government allowed CNN to open a bureau in Havana, Cuba, in 1997.” That's online at www.bizjournals.com.Below is an excerpt from de Moraes' story, an excerpt from an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Franklin Foer following up on his earlier New Republic story on how many media outlets, including CNN, traded truth for access to Baghdad, plus a link to a New York Post column on Jordan.
An excerpt from the story in the April 15 Washington Post by Lisa de Moraes, picking up after the section relaying the Jordan quotes listed above:
....Jordan denied that CNN withheld vital information from the public to maintain a reporting presence in Iraq:
"That is nonsense. No news organization in the world had a more contentious relationship with the Iraqi regime than CNN. The Iraqi leadership was so displeased with CNN's Iraq reporting, CNN was expelled from Iraq six times -- five times in previous years and one more time on Day 3 of this Iraq war."
In his memo, Jordan detailed the CNN reporters and anchors who have been booted or banned from Iraq, including Baghdad bureau chief Jane Arraf, who was barred in response to her reporting on a public protest demanding to know what happened to Iraqis who vanished after being abducted by Iraqi secret police. Also on the list were Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Aaron Brown, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson, Rym Brahimi, Sheila MacVicar, Ben Wedeman and Richard Roth.
Jordan yesterday told The TV Column that he's "surprised and disappointed" by the criticism.
"To me it was about one thing and one thing only -- saving lives of innocent people. It had nothing to do with access....Anybody who thinks it's more than that is absolutely wrong. I don't know anybody who would report a story that would get somebody killed."
With regard to cynicism among critics that he had decided to report nothing about the atrocities while making trips to Iraq to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders, Jordan told The TV Column, "It should be noted that news execs from every TV network in this country went themselves to Baghdad to argue their case."
As of last week, it was safe to write about the information he'd collected because the Hussein regime was over, Jordan said.
"I have no doubt whatsoever that in every case at least one person would have been killed for every piece, if I had disclosed earlier."
In his staff memo, Jordan said he chose to write the op-ed piece "to provide a record of one person's experiences with the brutality of the Iraqi regime and to ensure we maintain CNN's long record of reporting on atrocities around the world, even if in these cases we could do so only years later to protect the lives of innocent people."
END of Excerpt
Read the de Moraes story in full.
Following up on his October New Republic story, Frankin Foer penned a fresh piece for Monday's Wall Street Journal op-ed page, “CNN's Access of Evil.” For an excerpt of the most interesting portions of the very illuminating 3,500 word article in the October 28, 2002 edition of the New Republic by its associate editor, refer to the October 18, 2002 CyberAlert.
Read the entire original Foer piece as posted on www.tnr.com.
An excerpt from Foer's April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed:
....Of course, Mr. Jordan may feel he deserves a pinch of credit for coming clean like this. But this admission shouldn't get him any ethical journalism trophies. For a long time, CNN denied that its coverage skimped on truth. While I researched a story on CNN's Iraq coverage for the New Republic last October, Mr. Jordan told me flatly that his network gave "a full picture of the regime." In our conversation, he challenged me to find instances of CNN neglecting stories about Saddam's horrors. If only I'd had his Times op-ed!
Would that this were an outbreak of honesty, however belated. But it isn't. If it were, Mr. Jordan wouldn't be portraying CNN as Saddam's victim. He'd be apologizing for its cooperation with Iraq's erstwhile information ministry -- and admitting that CNN policy hinders truthful coverage of dictatorships. For CNN, the highest prize is "access," to score live camera feeds from a story's epicenter. Dictatorships understand this hunger, and also that it provides blackmail opportunities. In exchange for CNN bureaus, dictatorships require adherence to their own rules of reportage. They create conditions where CNN -- and other U.S. media -- can do little more than toe the regime's line.
The Iraq example is the telling one. Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf has turned into an international joke, but the operation of his ministry was a model of totalitarian efficiency. The ministry compiled dossiers on U.S. journalists. It refused to issue visas to anyone potentially hostile -- which meant that it didn't issue visas to reporters who strayed from al-Sahhaf's talking points. CNN correspondents Wolf Blitzer, Christiane Amanpour and Richard Roth, to name a few, were banned for critical reporting. It didn't take much to get on this list. A reporter who referred to "Saddam" (not "President Saddam Hussein") was shut out for "disrespect." If you didn't cover agitprop, like Saddam's 100% victory in October's referendum, the ministry made it clear that you were out....
With so little prospect for reporting the truth, you'd think that CNN and other networks would have stopped sending correspondents into Iraq. But the opposite occurred. Each time the regime threatened to pull the plug, network execs set out to assiduously reassure them. Mr. Jordan made 13 of these trips.
To be fair, CNN was not the only organization to play this game. But as the network of record, soi-disant, they have a longer trail than most. It makes rich reading to return to transcripts and compare the CNN version of Iraq with the reality that has emerged. For nearly a decade, the network gave credulous treatment to orchestrated anti-U.S. protests. When Saddam won his most recent "election," CNN's Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf treated the event as meaningful: "The point is that this really is a huge show of support" and "a vote of defiance against the United States." After Saddam granted amnesty to prisoners in October, she reported, this "really does diffuse one of the strongest criticisms over the past decades of Iraq's human-rights records."
For long stretches, Ms. Arraf was American TV's only Baghdad correspondent. Her work was often filled with such parrotings of the Baathist line. On the Gulf War's 10th anniversary, she told viewers, "At 63, [Saddam] mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf War, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding." She said little about human-rights violations, violent oppression, or festering resentment towards Saddam....
Reading Mr. Jordan now, you get the impression that CNN had no ethical option other than to soft-pedal. But there were alternatives. CNN could have abandoned Baghdad. Not only would they have stopped recycling lies, they could have focused more intently on obtaining the truth about Saddam. They could have diverted resources to Kurdistan and Jordan (the country), where recently arrived Iraqis could speak without fear of death. They could have exploited exile groups with underground contacts.
There's another reason why Mr. Jordan doesn't deserve applause. He says nothing about the lessons of Baghdad. After all, the network still sends correspondents to such countries as Cuba, Burma and Syria, ruled by dictators who impose media "guidelines."...
END of Excerpt
Saturday's New York Post carried an op-ed by editorial writer Eric Fettmann, “Craven News Network,” in which he argued:
“In return for its silence, CNN was allowed to maintain a permanent Baghdad bureau -- long the only one by a U.S. network in the Iraqi capital.
“But to what point -- if the only way to keep the bureau working was to soft-pedal Saddam's horrors? If you can't report the truth, why have journalists there in the first place?
“It's like saying that the best interests of journalism would have justified suppressing stories on the Holocaust during World War II in order to keep a U.S. news bureau in Berlin so as to be able to tell Nazi Germany's side of the story.”Read Fettmann's column in full.
Read the April 12, 2003 CyberAlert item on this subject, complete with an excerpt from Jordan's op-ed.
Read the April 14, 2003 CyberAlert item with comments about it made on Fox News Sunday.
CNN and others have done far worse by whitewashing the evil of Saddam's regime.
Read more about Wodehouse's ordeal here.
I thought it was CNN dogma that if they knew coalition forces were about to be ambushed, they wouldn't say a word -- in order to maintain their journalistic neutrality.
Didn't one of the big Network News anchors (Rather, Jennings, etc) indicate, several years ago, that if they were covering a war, and were in a position to warn US troops of an ambush, that they would withhold that information (even if it would get innocent people killed) because to help the US would be a journalistic sin?
As usual the left-wing media wants it both ways.
Instead of his death, he will preside over the death of his network, for becoming "the network you distrust." So be it. When the leader of any organization is vilainous and stupid, the organization below him winds up being destroyed. So, Jordan made himself Saddam's b*tch, newswise. Seems like he learned more deadly lessons than just that.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, now up on UPI, and FR, "I Believe" (1957-2003)
Yes the lying POS does know: because the case for regime change would have been made. Maybe even Bubba would have tried regime change if the public had gotten details of Saddam's atrocites from alleged journalists who were eyewitnesses and put up enough of a fuss.
Jordan can relativize and argue the definition of 'is' until he's blue in the face, but when President Bush began making his case for regime change in Iraq, CNN actively opposed him, when it would have been the PERFECT time for them to come clean. What's Jordan's excuse for that??
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