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It is in the breaking news sidebar!
Posted on 04/15/2003 11:53:56 AM PDT by Drew68
April 15, 2003
If you go to The New York Times Web site and click on "awards," you will find a remarkable list of Pulitzer Prizes the paper has won going back to 1918. The Times is justly proud of this roll call of honor, with one exception. Under the entry for 1932, "for reporting of the news from Russia," the Times adds the following disclaimer: "Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."
Discredited, indeed. Walter Duranty, the reporter who won the award in '32, was a shameless shill for the Soviet Union whose reporting helped cover up one of the great crimes of the 20th century: a famine in the Ukraine, engineered by Stalin, that killed millions.
Not only did Duranty downplay the hunger, he extolled the mass murderer and his vicious henchmen who manufactured it.
We found ourselves thinking of Duranty's squalid performance upon reading about some of the reports filed in recent years by CNN's Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf, as compiled by The New Republic's Franklin Foer. Too often, it is now uncomfortably clear, Arraf's interpretation of the news has been compatible with that of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party itself - a group of sadists in the tradition of Stalin's gang.
Upon Saddam's "re-election," for example, Arraf insisted it "really is a huge show of support" for him; and on the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War, she declared that Saddam was "not just standing tall but building up."
No, we're not suggesting that Arraf sympathized with Saddam in the way Duranty admired Stalin. But CNN clearly does have a lot of explaining to do regarding its prewar coverage, particularly given a remarkable admission by its chief news executive, Eason Jordan, in Friday's New York Times.
"Over the last dozen years," Jordan wrote, "I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. 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."
Jordan recounted several stories that CNN suppressed regarding torture and threats of murder - all in the name of keeping CNN's Baghdad bureau open and protecting its local staff.
Every employer has a duty to protect its workers, and Jordan's concern on that front is entirely defensible. But there's little doubt that the primary goal during his frequent forays to Baghdad was to maintain CNN's presence there. If CNN had simply left Iraq, after all, it wouldn't have had Iraqi nationals to protect in the first place.
Why didn't CNN shut down its Baghdad bureau rather than suppress news of the horrifying reality of Saddam's police state? Whose interests, for example, did the network serve by presenting state-orchestrated demonstrations against the U.S. as genuine news events?
For that matter, how many stories does CNN suppress in covering other police states - Syria, for example, or the Palestinian Authority?
We like CNN. It has excellent reporters such as Wolf Blitzer (who was banned from Iraq because of his honest coverage) and its performance during the current war has been first-rate. But its proud slogan that it is the "most trusted" news source is in nothing less than tatters given what we now know about its prewar coverage of Iraq.
They also had film of ragheads dancing after the space shuttle Columbia blew up. Learning their lesson from 9-11, they decided not to air this footage at all.
HELL NO!
Let's ask their Havana Bureau chief.
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