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Posted on 04/13/2003 1:27:48 PM PDT by perfect stranger
April 12, 2003 --
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday revealed that his network had refused for years to report what it knew about Saddam Hussein's murderous atrocities - even against its own journalists.
This astonishing confession doesn't just undermine CNN's claim to be "the most trusted name in news" - it wreaks incalculable damage on all journalists' ability to be trusted by the American people.
In a New York Times op-ed piece, Jordan disclosed that over the past dozen years CNN kept a tight lid on "awful things that could not be reported, because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."
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.
Until yesterday, CNN long insisted that its arrangement with Saddam Hussein and his henchmen did not impair its ability to report freely.
"CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine," Jordan told NPR's Bob Garfield last October. "It's prepared to be forthright, is forthright in its reporting. We wouldn't have a team in northern Iraq right now if we didn't want to upset the Saddam Hussein regime."
Perhaps, but even Peter Arnett, who became a star reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War, conceded to The New Republic's Franklin Foer last fall that "there's a quid pro quo for being there [in Baghdad]. You go in and they control what you do. So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq."
Foer's devastating piece detailed how Western reporters - CNN's Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, chief among them - would "mimic the Ba'ath Party line" in a "go along to get along" strategy.
And, in fact, CNN worked long and hard over the years to convince Saddam's regime that it could trust the cable network.
In a remarkable on-air exchange in 1996, after Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz said Arnett would only be allowed back into Baghdad "if you promise that you will give candid, objective, fair coverage," CNN anchor Bernard Shaw replied: "We have no axes to grind, we don't support any particular government," then pleaded with Aziz to let CNN "enter your country so that we can report both sides of the story."
But as we now know, thanks to its chief news executive, that's not what CNN had in mind.
Among the stories suppressed by CNN, according to Jordan:
* Other Iraqis working for Western press organizations similarly disappeared - some for good.
* A Kuwaiti woman who had spoken with CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then had her body torn limb from limb, the parts left in a bag on her family's doorstep.
* Uday Hussein boasted directly to Jordan that he would assassinate his two brothers-in-law, who had defected. Months later, both men were lured back and killed.
Indeed, CNN's silence seems to have cost as many lives as it may have saved.
What did it show instead? Foer notes such stories as a series of public "demonstrations" for Sadam's 65th birthday. "Everyone knows they're a sham," one Western journalist told Foer, "but CNN in Atlanta is telling [correspondent] Nic Robertson that he has to file a story, so he shows the demonstration."
Selling such propaganda as news is problematic enough. Keeping quiet about the real news - torture, initimidation and murder - makes a mockery of journalists' professed responsibility to be a truth-teller.
That's the problem with Faustian bargains - like the one Eason Jordan and CNN made with Saddam Hussein to keep CNN reporting from Baghdad. Ultimately, it means the devil takes possession of your soul for eternity.
Not breaking news anymore but a finely written piece. Seems to crystalize the facts.
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