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 ...
Thanks. I'm curious about what Jordan said.
As someone who makes plenty of mistakes myself and has plenty of regrets, I certainly have compassion for Eason.
However Eason doesn't, yet, even realize he made a mistake.
He's attempting to convince us that he really had no options. He does not seem to be confessing so much as covering his ***.
He broadcasted his own behavior to public scrutiny. The public is permitted to comment on it. Especially after Eason opted to lie about it many times during his NPR interview last October.
I expect that NYT will want to portray the Iraqis as ungovernable and hateful to their American "colonists" and "oppressors" to make GWB look bad. I'm sure Raines can twist the stories to make the Iraqis look good and we to be the bullies.
That's as maybe, but he basically admitted that all of their coverage in dictatorships around the world is at the least highly suspect and at the most total garbage. Of course, he could be depending on the mainstrean media to not make a deal of it...unfortunately, I would say there's a better than average chance of this.
Its a euphemism if you want it to be. So you aren't shopping today, okay.
Apparently you do need to go back to school. "Its" is the possessive form of it. The contraction you're looking for is "it's" for "it is". As in, it's great for you to espouse situational ethics, after all, you're in great company: Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Usama bin Laden and Saddam were all proud advocates of situational ethics or as we better know it, the ends justify the means. I'm sure all of the criminals in our Justice system feel the same way as well.
You know, as in, "it's okay to steal this Ferrari since this guy has obviously made his money off the sweat of his underpaid workers and I can't afford a Ferrari so it's okay in this situation for me to steal it. In fact, it's a moral imperative. He needs to get his, and I'll show em."
Please, spare me your bs compassion argument as well. He chose to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open so he could broadcast CNN's rose-colored view of Iraq and Saddam for twelve years. Instead of compassion, how about adding another word to your vocabulary: integrity. I do have compassion for the people of Iraq whose lives were taken, tortured or imprisoned. How long would this have continued if CNN had told the truth? I don't believe their version of "ethics" had anything to do with it, situational or otherwise. They were making money, and if you've ever watched CNN, I think Saddam is their cup of tea.
I normally don't criticize people's spelling or grammar since I don't expect it to be perfect in a forum and I invariably make a mistake in my next post, but your best response to date was blah blah blah. So son, it sounds like you need to get you some edumacation, or are you one of those tragically hip, tattooed and pierced contrarians who take the opposite side of any issue to be a rebel and stir the pot?
Remember I'm not a high level journalist like you seem to think you are, so I don't get important memos telling me the truth about what has happened that particular day so I don't get to imply that I'm important or that I'm in the loop and that you're just part of the hoi polloi so what I say must be the last word of any subject.
From your own hands to my posting with the truck driver language edited out, Nope, I'm a journalist and I get a ton of emails each day from many sources, and I saw the transcript. The platoon leader f**ked up. He waited to fire the warning shot and didn't do it and then they plowed the vehicle. His superior yelled at him, You just killed a fing family because you waited too long!
See angst in action: http://www.freeRepublic.com/focus/news/881790/posts?page=50#50
Obviously, I went back and read some of your postings. Even though I'm not a journalist, I do know how the search function works. Your posting pattern isn't to respond to someone else, it appears to be intended only to prove how clever, witty and knowledgeable you are,and by extension, how dumb everyone else is. Anyone, even those who aren't journalists are welcome to search the archives and they'll see what I'm talking about. In this thread, you attacked clintonbaiter who posted an excerpt and made a comment that many of us here probably agree with.
I notice that you didn't respond at all to the meat of my posting about how your so-called compassion and situational ethics are pure bs in this or any other situation. Anything to add to that?
Now I know you've got a column or a story or something that no doubt will earn you a well deserved Pulitzer due and the Augusta protest is probably taking a lot of your valuable time but you could at least refute my points one by one or is "blah blah blah" (post#47)the extent of your informed riposte?
One more thing, I think it's important for journalists (notice how reporters are all self-titled "journalists" these days? Sound more impressive?)to reveal their biases. If, say, you're a certain Senator and you complain on the Senate floor about airline monetary and regulatory relief, and you leave out the fact that your wife is an airline lobbyist, wouldn't you think that dishonest? I'll go first and state that I'm a conservative Republican. Now it's your turn.
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