Lest we be fergat...
Posted on 04/24/2003 1:55:53 PM PDT by knighthawk
CNN News Executive Eason Jordan's confession, published in The New York Times on April 11, created a stir in media circles. Entitled "The News We Kept To Ourselves," Mr. Jordan agonized about the trips he made over the past 12 years to lobby Saddam's regime to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open.
"Each time I visited," Mr. Jordan wrote, "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."
The CNN news chief's confession took me back 12 years to the first Gulf War. News anchor Dan Rather was asking one of CBS's Baghdad-bureau reporters, Betsy Aaron, to sum up her Iraqi experience in one sentence. The date was March 7, 1991. The day before, on March 6, Ms. Aaron, along with other Western reporters, had been expelled from Iraq and had made her way safely to Jordan.
"The one thing people have to know," Ms. Aaron replied, "is that this man, privately, Saddam Hussein, is a hated man."
The problem was -- as I noted in a column on March 18 -- this wasn't what Ms. Aaron had been reporting. She had been on CBS news almost every night during the war, with film clips of people shouting support for Saddam and spewing hatred of America. The same was reflected in her commentary -- e.g., on Feb. 27 Ms. Aaron did a stand-up from Baghdad, saying: "With their city in ruins, what is left on the street is pride .... The average citizen is confused by the politics swirling around him. He thinks the Iraqi government has made every concession that it can make for a peace with honour."
Once she could speak freely, the first thing Ms. Aaron told us was that the nub of her experience as a journalist contradicted the essence of her reports from Iraq. Which begged the question of what CBS hoped to achieve by sending her there.
"Networks know, or ought to know," I wrote 12 years ago, "that if a journalist has official permission to file reports from inside a tyranny he or she cannot tell the truth. Such a reporter will, at best, say nothing. Or else he'll be a mouthpiece, however reluctantly, for the tyrant's propaganda."
Which is what virtually all reporters ended up becoming in Iraq. CNN's Peter Arnett may have done it more lustily than most, but the major U.S. networks weren't far behind. A contemporary MediaWatch study, after analyzing every ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News item originating from Baghdad from Feb. 1 to Feb. 27, 1991, concluded that the correspondents reported on Iraqi opinion "without once suggesting the possibility of opposition" to Saddam. The researchers also found that one third of the news reports described Iraqi battle claims without challenge.
According to MediaWatch, the reporters weren't permitted to film any but civilian damage, yet only ABC's Bill Blakemore explained to viewers the Iraqis wouldn't allow him to see or discuss military targets. Naturally the impression created was the Allies bombed only civilians in Iraq. NBC's Tom Aspell went further. He conveyed the impression that the Iraqi version was true and the American version doubtful, by commenting on Feb. 18: "This morning they showed what's left of the milk factory bombed here weeks ago. The U.S. is still insisting it's a biological weapons plant."
In short, Mr. Jordan's recent revelations came as no surprise. Reporters "embedded" in dictatorships have always ended up going to bed with dictators -- a few willingly, and the rest by force of circumstances. The question is, why report from places like Baghdad?
Twelve years ago Ms. Aaron said on CBS This Morning: "I think you do a very valuable service reporting no matter what you are allowed to report." This may be the most memorable expression of a preference for illusion over content on record -- the art of reporting for its own sake -- but it's still nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that.
Mr. Jordan simply writes: "I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me." Offering no justification is the only thing to his credit -- but possibly he thinks none is needed. All he feels awful about is having been prevented from running with his scoops. As a Chicago Sun-Times editorial put it last week: "Perhaps the most incredible part of his account is that there is no sense that Jordan recognizes that CNN did anything wrong."
Mr. Jordan knew that one couldn't report from Baghdad with integrity: That's what his op-ed piece is about. Maybe he fails to realize, just as Ms. Aaron failed to realize in 1991, that reporting has no value apart from its integrity, and reporting of no integrity has negative value. But the truth may be simpler: It may be the disease of dateline-itis. As Mark Steyn wrote last week: "What mattered to CNN was not the two-minute report of rewritten Saddamite press releases but the sign off: 'Jane Arraf, CNN, Baghdad.' As Jordan acknowledged, this squalid trade-off cost real lives."
And that's bad news.
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