Damn sad bargain (CNN deal with Saddam)

Arizona Republic ^ | April 16, 2003 | Editorial staff

[fightinJAG]

The editorial browbeating of CNN news editor Eason Jordan has been pretty much on the hour every hour since his amazing tell-all last week about his network's outpost in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.

Jordan wrote on the New York Times op-ed page about how his network had concealed appalling viciousness perpetrated by Saddamists upon CNN's native Iraqi employees - one was kidnapped and tortured with cattle prods.

[gcruse]

That's what made me so furious. The bland assumption on Jordan's part that some pasty-faced, limp-wristed apology could begin to atone for the crimes his omission papered over. It's like tossing off the WTC attacks by saying, "We can build two more."

[harpo11]

Complicity News Network

[browardchad]

I still think there's more, and worse things than slanted reporting, to the CNN story. Journalists as couriers, perhaps? I also wonder why, after 12 years of pandering to Saddam, they were suddenly expelled from Baghdad. Cover?

Saddam loved to turn the knife, and once CNN got in too deep, it's easy to imagine a number of different, and ugly, scenarios.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

One of Jordan's worst transgressions is that he failed to appreciate the freedoms his own nation affords the press as compared to the monstrosity he witnessed first-hand in Baghdad.

"The government we have the toughest time with is the U.S. government," Jordan said in 1999.

It's hard to defend a guy with a perspective like that.

In fact, it's impossible. All such reporting is a half-truth, and a very big lie. Of course, there is the fact of who was in power in Washington in 1999. But even so--compared with Saddam?

[Steve Eisenberg]

I still think there's more, and worse things than slanted reporting, to the CNN story.

I agree. The Eason Jordan New York Times article ( The News We Kept to Ourselves) is short even for an op ed. If Mr. Jordan wanted to come reasonably clean, he would have written an article ten or twenty times as long, and offered it to the New York Times Magazine, or the Atlantic.

This isn't CNN coming clean. It's CNN knowing that the truth of their complicity was coming out and trying to get a bit in front of it with a partial revelation.

[Wilhelm Tell]

It's Saddam shame.

[CFC__VRWC]

I never thought I'd see the day that I actually agree with an Arizona Republic editorial, but here it is.

[martin_fierro]

[The Great Satan]

He and his network allowed a tyrant to enforce a tyrant's rules on a supposedly powerful American news organization whose currency is truth.

That's funny -- I thought it was socialism.

[NCC-1701]

What did CNN know and when did they know it?

[Mr. K]

The bottom line is this: Sodamn Hinsane must have been pleased as all heck to have an outlet for his propganda in CNN.

Get it CNN? You did what he wanted. You assisted him. Picture him sitting at his desk saying "Give this to CNN"

[mewzilla]

What do they know now? Does their reporting from Syria take place with a minder present? Does someone from the gov't go over their copy before they put it out? Inquiring minds want to know...

[NCC-1701]

They knew a h*ll of a lot. More than anyone can dream of. As I posted on another thread, the survivors of those tortured to death should fle the largest class-action lawsuit ever against the clinochio news network. They should break it in every way possible. Eliminate it from the airwaves. Then go for each of the alphabet "news" organizations, except Fox, in turn. I bet they knew things too but acted like cnn did. On the other hand, keep cnn around so we can always point to them as the benchmark for lies, deciet, corruption, and everything else wrong with the liberal media.

[fightinJAG]

On that point, did you see the film of the Iraqi ambassador to the UN going back to kiss CNN's reporter on each cheek in an emotional good-bye after it became clear "the game was up"?

When troll-mouthpieces of the Butcher of Baghdad are kissing your reporters and crying and saying "Richard, thank you SO much for EVERYTHING," yagottawonder.

[browardchad]

On that point, did you see the film of the Iraqi ambassador to the UN going back to kiss CNN's reporter on each cheek in an emotional good-bye after it became clear "the game was up"?

You have to wonder about that, since Aldouri left the same day the CNN op-ed was printed in the NYT. It wouldn't be out-of-character for a member of the Iraqi regime to purposely turn the knife by singling out a CNN reporter for a kiss as a parting shot -- OTOH, they could very well have been pals, given CNN's pandering policy.

[1rudeboy]

My question is, if CNN did who else did?