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The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read]
The New York Times ^
| 04/11/03
| EASON JORDAN
Posted on 04/10/2003 9:16:06 PM PDT by Pokey78
ATLANTA Over the last dozen years 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.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.
TOPICS: Breaking News; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 4thestate5thcolumn; biasmeanslayoffs; blameamericafirst; cablenewsnetwork; ccrm; censorship; chickennoodlenews; clintonnewsnetwork; cnn; cnnajoke; cnnbloodonhands; cnncoconspirator; cnndeception; cnndictators; cnnkeptquiet; cnnknew; cnnlied; cnnlies; coverup; deathsquads; easonjordan; enemedia; genevaconvention; hateamericafirst; iraq; iraqhistory; iraqifreedom; lamestreammedia; leakbeforediscovery; liars; liberalbias; liberalmedia; mediabias; neverforget; reportersuberotrture; rush; saddam; secretpolice; selfcensorship; torture; trysellingthetruth; uday; war; warcrime; warcrimes; wedontreportthat
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To: MS.BEHAVIN
October 25, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: After journalists were expelled from Iraq on Thursday, CNN head of news-gathering Eason Jordan, called the move "a Draconian measure that will sharply curtail the world's knowledge about what is happening in Iraq. Iraq is often displeased with CNN," says Jordan, "but especially this week when the network reported from the scene of that extraordinary protest in Baghdad."
EASON JORDAN: The big beef was that we reported that gunfire was used to disperse the demonstrators which is absolutely irrefutable fact, but the Iraqi government sometimes denies the facts and refuses to acknowledge the truth.
BOB GARFIELD: Well what kind of weird conversation is it with the Iraqi officials that you're having when you're holding up a, a piece of videotape and saying this is black and they're saying no, no that's white. It's bizarre!
EASON JORDAN: Well there are a lot of bizarre things in Iraq, and unfortunately the Iraqi officials refuse to look at the videotape because they said they didn't care what it showed or what was heard on the tape because the reality -the Iraqi reality - was very different from the actual facts.
BOB GARFIELD: I'm sure you have seen Franklin Foer's article in The New Republic which charges that the Western press is appeasing the Iraqi regime in order to maintain its visas -- to be there reporting should a war ultimately break out. What's your take on that?
EASON JORDAN: The writer clearly doesn't have a clear understanding of the realities on the ground because CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine; that it's prepared to be forthright; is forthright in its reporting. We wouldn't have a team in northern Iraq right now if we didn't want to upset the Saddam Hussein regime. We wouldn't report on the demonstration if we didn't want to upset the Saddam Hussein regime. We wouldn't have been thrown out of Iraq already 5 times over the last several years if we were there to please the Saddam Hussein regime. So the story was lopsided, unfair and chose to ignore facts that would refute the premise of the article.
BOB GARFIELD: Well what is the calculus? In the New Republic article he cites the coverage of Saddam Hussein's birthday by CNN which he deemed to be not a huge news event. Are you tossing bones to Saddam Hussein in order to be there when, when it really matters?
EASON JORDAN: No. I don't think that's the case at all. Now, there is Iraqi propaganda that is news! I mean there is propaganda from a lot of governments around the world that is newsworthy and we should report on those things. Saddam Hussein's birthday is a big deal in that country. We're not reading Iraqi propaganda; we're reporting as an independent news organization.
BOB GARFIELD: Back in '91 CNN and Peter Arnett in particular were heavily criticized, mostly by civilians, for reporting from within Baghdad during the U.S. attack in ways that they'd consider to be utter propaganda and to-- out of context and not reflecting the overall reality of Saddam Hussein' regime. Have you analyzed what you can get access to without appearing to be just a propaganda tool for Saddam?
EASON JORDAN: Well absolutely. I mean we work very hard to report forthrightly, to report fairly and to report accurately and if we ever determine we cannot do that, then we would not want to be there; but we do think that some light is better than no light whatsoever. I think that the world, the American people will be shortchanged if foreign journalists are kicked out, because even in Peter Arnett's case there were things that he reported on -- and this is a long time ago now -- but things he reported on that I don't think would have been reported at all had he not been there. We feel committed to our Baghdad presence. We've had a bureau there for 12 years with occasional interruptions when we've been thrown out, but we're not there to please the Iraqi government -- we're not there to displease the Iraqi government -- we're just there to do our job.
BOB GARFIELD: Let's say there's an -- a second Gulf War. Is that the mother of all stories? Do you have to be there? Are there-- decisions you'll make on the margins to be s-- as certain as you possibly can that you will have a presence there?
EASON JORDAN: We'd very much like to be there if there's a second war; but-- we are not going to make journalistic compromises in an effort to make that happen, being mindful that in wartime there is censorship on all sides, and we're prepared to deal with a certain amount of censorship as long as it's not-- extreme, ridiculous censorship where -- which we've actually seen a number of cases in previous conflicts -- not just with Iraq. But-- sure! We want to be there, but it's --we don't want to be there come hell or high water. We want to be there if we can be there and operate as a responsible news organization.
BOB GARFIELD: Very well. Eason Jordan, thank you very much.
EASON JORDAN: Okay, thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Eason Jordan is the chief news executive and news-gathering president for CNN News Group. He joined us from CNN studios in Atlanta. [MUSIC]
421
posted on
04/11/2003 2:18:06 AM PDT
by
kcvl
To: KingKongCobra
March 26, 2000
CNN AND PSYOPS
By Alexander Cockburn
Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN's hq in Atlanta.
However insignificant Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN may now describe the Army psyops tours at CNN as having been, the commanding officer of the Psy-ops group thought them as sufficient significance to mention at a high level Pentagon seminar about propaganda and psychological warfare. It could be that CNN was the target of a psyops penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on.
It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan start spouting high-toned stuff about CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to spout government or Pentagon propaganda. The relationship is most vividly summed up by the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's leading foreign correspondent, and a woman whose reports about the fate of Kosovan refugees did much to fan public appetite for NATO's war, is literally and figuratively in bed with spokesman for the US State Department, and a leading propagandist for NATO during that war, her husband James Rubin.If CNN truly wanted to maintain the appearance of objectivity, it would have taken Amanpour off the story. Amanpour, by the way, is still a passionate advocate for NATO's crusade, most recently on the Charlie Rose show.
In the first two weeks of the war in Kosovo CNN produced thirty articles for the Internet, according to de Vries, who looked them up for his first story. An average CNN article had seven mentions of Tony Blair, NATO spokesmen like Jamie Shea and David Wilby or other NATO officials. Words like refugees, ethnic cleansing, mass killings and expulsions were used nine times on the average. But the so-called Kosovo Liberation Armmy (0.2 mentions) and the Yugoslav civilian victims (0.3 mentions) barely existed for CNN.
422
posted on
04/11/2003 2:22:30 AM PDT
by
kcvl
To: MS.BEHAVIN
CNN prides itself on its journalistic independence and impartiality and is committed to accurate, fair, responsible reporting.
eason.jordan@turner.com Fax: 404-827-3134
423
posted on
04/11/2003 2:25:08 AM PDT
by
kcvl
To: Pokey78
424
posted on
04/11/2003 2:27:33 AM PDT
by
kcvl
To: Howlin
HonestReporting member John Wolberg complained to CNN, and received the following reply from Eason Jordan, CNN's chief of international newsgathering:
From: "Jordan, Eason" (
Eason.Jordan@turner.com)
Dear Mr. Wolberg:
The CNN.com report to which you refer contained factual errors, errors in omission, and inadequate context, and has been corrected.
Shortcomings in reporting are no more acceptable to me than they should be to consumers of news reporting. My colleagues and I may be imperfect but we most certainly are not anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli. The vast majority of CNN's Mideast reporting is as we intend all of CNN's reporting to be: accurate, balanced, fair and responsible.
Thank you for your note.
425
posted on
04/11/2003 2:34:57 AM PDT
by
kcvl
To: nutmeg
Unbelievable the way many in this country have lost their balls. Can you imagine William Randolph Hearst putting up with that sh!t?
You're more than right, nutmeg. This is very disturbing and on many levels.
Thanks for the ping.
426
posted on
04/11/2003 2:53:12 AM PDT
by
metesky
(My retirement fund is holding steady @ $.05 a can)
To: Pokey78
I just e-mailed this one to about a dozen people. BTTT
To: rdb3; Khepera; elwoodp; MAKnight; condolinda; mafree; Trueblackman; FRlurker; Teacher317; ...
Journalistic integrity? Not...
Black conservative ping
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
428
posted on
04/11/2003 3:00:35 AM PDT
by
mhking
("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it...")
To: Humidston
'Tis the Gift to be simple.
'Tis the Gift to be free.
'Tis the Gift to be just where we ought to be...
429
posted on
04/11/2003 3:01:15 AM PDT
by
gridlock
(The Whizzo Chocolate Co. is happy to announce that Crunchy Frog will be available again soon.)
To: kcvl
My email to mister Jordan -
I'm glad I don't have to sleep with your demons. Well, how could I? I don't make deals with the devil. You and your network sat back quietly for 13 years while Sadam was on his dastardly reign and YOU KNEW. Is there a word more descriptive than EVIL?
Here are your own words "I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed."
Gee, you didn't think maybe that was newsworthy in some way?
How many years will pass before you tell us what's happening in the countries where some of your other offices are located?
To: kcvl
You don't know how relieved I am that so many Americans are up in arms over CNN. I was concerned that there were a majority of Americans that actually believed everything they saw on CNN, and I see now, after discovering Free Republic that this is not so. Whew!!!!! Up here in Ontario, we don't call it CNN, we call it the Ministry of Fear. (All anthrax, all the time). How refreshing to see it trashed south of the border as well.
Having said that, I find the presence of psy-ops at CNN not surprising. I think it is still possible that CNN is a government agency designed to enrage Republicans to action, (which it has done admirably) and give the appearance of placating the libs.
George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
431
posted on
04/11/2003 3:10:58 AM PDT
by
wolf6656
(The only truth is people that my dog likes, or dislikes.)
To: Henk; CatOwner
My sentiments as well- this muffled whine about how rough it was for them to keep quiet is ridiculous. I find it incredible and disgusting they didn't have the decency to pack up and leave and tell the world what was going on.
432
posted on
04/11/2003 3:14:46 AM PDT
by
visualops
(Let's go freeple! Get on the monthly!)
To: wolf6656
Add on to above. If only Canadians had a "NEWS", network that would convince them to vote out these Liberals up here. We really need to get all of our conservatives on the same page. Instead we have the CBC, which , $%#%^ never mind, I can't go there now.
Go Islanders! We don't even like Ottawa's hockey team.
433
posted on
04/11/2003 3:16:40 AM PDT
by
wolf6656
(The only truth is people that my dog likes, or dislikes.)
To: visualops
I heard they have similar experiences in their reporting of the Democratic Party.
To: KingKongCobra
I'm only halfway through the comments, but I can't hold back any longer. If somebody else has made this point before, excuse my rant.
You know what pisses me off? I'LL TELL YOU WHAT PISSES ME OFF!!!
CNN knew that Iraqi employees were routinely subject to abduction, torture and murder. So why did they have so many Iraqi employees? Why did they have any Iraqi employees?
If your Cameraman is going to be pulled of the street and subjected to electroshock torture, then buck your own damn camera around!
If your driver is going to have his family disappeared, buy a map and drive yourselves, you bunch of pampered prima-donnas.
If your secretary, or the girl who brings you coffee is going to raped in some secret police dungeon, maybe you should type your own memos and pour your own coffee.
If the guy who combs Wolf Blitzer's smooth hair-do is going to have his fingernails pulled out, then I would prefer to look at Wolf Blitzer with mussy hair.
Wouldn't you?
But CNN, the bunch of lying, weasel, pampered, holier-than-thou prima-donnas, goes out and hires all of these locals to take care of them and to make sure they look good on camera and never have to break a sweat. Then when the predictable happens, and these people are subject to the predations of the Iraqi regime, they wring their hands and mumble about how there was nothing they could do.
I will never, never again look at a CNN broadcast without immediately spitting on the floor. These people are dead to me.
435
posted on
04/11/2003 3:21:00 AM PDT
by
gridlock
(Oh man, I'm pissed!)
To: Pokey78
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
I don't give a dam how you felt if you didn't have the guts
to act and do the right thing.
Another liberal says,"We knew all along, but we HAD to be silent!"
Bull crap.
Note to CNN, you were FREE to tell the truth all along.
436
posted on
04/11/2003 3:21:06 AM PDT
by
tet68
(Jeremiah 51:24 ..."..Before your eyes I will repay Babylon for all the wrong they have done in Zion")
To: CatOwner
Any one of them could write an autobiography(at the very least), without bosses or former bosses having any say-so.
The content of their reporting belongs to the boss, but I don't see how future works could be.
437
posted on
04/11/2003 3:23:44 AM PDT
by
visualops
(Let's go freeple! Get on the monthly!)
To: Pokey78
I think Ted Turner and all top AOL/Time Warner/CNN managment should be tried as war criminals. They were just as responsible for Sadam's and the Ba'aths party crimes as Hitler's media henchmen in WWII.
Their line is "truth? you can't handle the truth. Oh, by the way, if we tell you the real truth, it might go against our own preconceived political views, and hurt or ratings." So shut up and just listen to the lies we tell you until you believe them.
438
posted on
04/11/2003 3:33:02 AM PDT
by
machman
To: Pokey78
Just sick. CNN prefered to keep "our man in Baghdad" rather than report the truth about the regime. They (and the rest of the duplicitous media hacks) have the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis on their hands.
To: Pokey78
He doesn't feel as awfull as the families of the dead Marines, Army and Air Force members who's loved ones are dead or wounded. Thanks CNN, thanks leftist media pukes. Weither Clinton or Saddam, you guys always have a reason for "feeling" the way you do.
440
posted on
04/11/2003 3:36:40 AM PDT
by
Leisler
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