Just posted on WSJ Best of the Web---This will be a very big story going beyond Iraq, to Cuba and the PLO
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003329 Censored News Network
Here's a journalistic scandal for you: In a New York Times op-ed, Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, acknowledges having covered up major news stories in Iraq for fear that the regime would kill its journalists or expel the network from Iraq:
I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails). . . .
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us. . . .
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
This is nothing new to readers of this column; as we noted in October, The New Republic's Franklin Foer reported on the compromises CNN and other news organizations made to keep a presence in Baathist Baghdad. Foer's conclusion is worth repeating:
When I asked CNN's Jordan to explain why his network is so devoted to maintaining a perpetual Baghdad presence, he listed two reasons: "First, because it's newsworthy; second, because there's an expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be CNN." His answer reveals the fundamental attitude of most Western media: Access to Baghdad is an end in itself, regardless of the intellectual or moral caliber of the journalism such access produces. An old journalistic aphorism holds "access is a curse." The Iraqi experience proves it can be much worse than that.
One cheer for Jordan for coming clean about his network's collaboration with a brutal fascist regime. And a question: What are CNN and other news organizations failing to tell us about other thuggish regimes, from communist Cuba to the Palestinian Authority?
I hope I was wrong. I hope that this will become a big story in the regular media. At least, it looks like people will pay attention to this corruption scandal in the news media for more than a day.
One cheer for Jordan for coming clean about his network's collaboration with a brutal fascist regime. This was not voluntary on his part, it was a pre-emptive attempt to deflect the crap that was sure to hit the fan.
It all makes sense now as to why CNN seemed so utterly opposed to this war. This war would free the Iraqis of the Saddam regime and then the People of Iraq would tell the truth that CNN had buried.
I can only hope that every CNN news pass for the new Iraqi regime will be revoked and that CNN will be treated with the same contempt that the Iraqi people now hold for the old State Run TV.
BTW if CNN was not going to run any story that was not essentially pre-approved by the Saddam regime, then what did we need CNN for? Why didn't they just simulcast the Iraqi News Network. The news was the same.