Posted on 04/12/2003 7:29:41 AM PDT by clintonbaiter
April 12, 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 this year's Moral Idiocy Award in Journalism. 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 Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."
Instead of closing down CNN's Baghdad 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 his staff safe was to fire them and close the Bureau, then assign one or two individual reporters to keep their ears open for a couple of years, and then have them come home and write their story -- the true story of the regime.
What possible journalistic value could broadcasting half-truths, lies and varnished news have? The net result is that CNN succeeded not in informing its public but in 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....
(Excerpt) Read more at iconoclast.ca ...
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a move it said would focus more attention on the shortcomings of Communist Cuba, the Clinton administration gave the go-ahead Wednesday for 10 U.S. news organizations to open bureaus in Cuba. Of the 10, only CNN has permission from the Cuban government.
SO according to this CNN reporter there are some lives that are worth more than others? The Iraqis that were suffering at the hands of Saddam weren't as important?
What did CNN know and when did they know it?
They've got Waldo in a closet.
In addition to dis-informing the public, Eason Jordan lied by saying (multiple times) that CNN would only report accurately in Iraq.
From a transcript of an NPR interview with Eason Jordan
Jordan lied by making each of these statements on October 25, 2002
However, I always noticed that at the end of his spiel, he had said nothing of substance, nothing new, nothing insightful, nothing informative. It was just a spate of words, words, words.
It was so obvious that he was on a leash and hoodwinking American viewers with meaningless pap and many times, outright enemy propaganda.
This Judas, CNN and his other employers past and present sold their souls for twenty pieces of dinars and will live in infamy forever.
Leni
Air War: How Saddam Manipulates the U. S. Media
There are alternatives to mindlessly reciting Baghdad's spin. Instead of desperately trying to keep their Baghdad offices open, the networks could scour Kurdistan and Jordan, where there are many recently arrived Iraqis who can talk freely "Amman is the place to find out what's really going on in Iraq," says ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, who spent the mid-'90s working in and around Iraq. (To CNN's credit, it has sent reporter Brent Sadler to Kurdistan despite Baghdad's furious objections.) Or they could they use their access to depict the harsh realities of life under Saddam--even if it means never returning to Iraq.It's a method used by Soler in his documentary Uncle Saddam, to be aired on Cinemax next month. After spending a month ingratiating himself with Saddam's entourage, Soler convinced the Iraqis to grant him camera time with His Excellency's inner circle. His film shows Saddam to be a lunatic, devoid of morality or humanity. It captures images of Saddam's unique style of fishing-hurling grenades into a pond and then sending aides to retrieve the kill. It documents Saddam's megalomania: Iraq's biggest paper features Saddam in a new pose on the cover each day. "I don't need a relationship with Iraq," he explains of his decision to bare all. "It was my one shot. Every day it was how can I push the limits."
To be sure, after screening his documentary for film festivals and Iraqi opposition groups in the U.S., Soler found red paint splattered on his Los Angeles home, his trash can set on fire, and a death threat in his mailbox. But with the film he smuggled out of Iraq via courier, Soler gives more psychological insight into Saddam than ten years of American TV reportage.
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.
Yellow Journalism at its best.
He paid Chirac and many others to keep Iraq in the adminstrative arenas for so long. He also paid media types (just as Castro pays media types) to keep the bad news down. It should not surprise anyone that CNN has censored the news to fit the Iraqi agenda for many years.
Now, imagine how they shaded the news to protect Willie the Sleaze, fudge the election reporting to try and get Gore elected (the false report by the election sampling outfit that Gore had won Florida was pure fiction), the reporting on the creativity of the Florida Supreme Court, the lack of coverage about any evil by a leftist, and many other things. The Fonda heritage is alive and well at CNN.
BTW, did CNN cover all the Cubans that were just murdered by Castro, three days after the end of their trial for trying to escape? Can you imagine what CNN and the NYT would say if Texas even suggested they were thinking about such expeditious handling? Alas, the NYT is probably smarter than CNN and would never admit they were shading the truth, as well.
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