April 11, 2003

CNN: Cowardly News Network

Some truly shocking admissions from CNN's "chief news executive" responsible for keeping its bureau open in Baghdad. No, not the stuff about how Saddam Hussein and his regime tortured people. The shocking thing is that CNN aided and abetted such maniacal behavior for years, by keeping its Baghdad bureau open, keeping Iraqis on its staff, and presenting to the world a far more benign view of Saddam - a view that CNN knew was not true. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. CNN did worse than nothing. It provided PR services for a mass murderer. CNN has blood on its hands.

CNN's Eason Jordan admits:

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.

What should CNN have done? Stopped hiring locals, for one. And if that wasn't possible, CNN should have closed its Baghdad bureau and stopped putting Iraqis at risk by being there. But mostly, CNN should have told the world what is going on. CNN Iraqi staffers were tortured while CNN stayed silent. It's ludicrous after-the-fact corporate ass-covering to suggest the speaking out would have put its Iraqi staffers in danger. They already were in danger. Reporting that to the world might well have pressured the regime to change its ways. But we'll never know because CNN was more interested in keeping its prestigious Baghdad bureau open than in fully reporting the horrors of the regime that hosted them there.

Some will whine and prattle on about the need for journalistic neutrality, but journalists are not exempt from the responsibility to make moral choices, and neutrality in the face of evil isn't neutrality at all. At best, it is cowardice. At worst, it is aid and comfort to the evil. I can't watch CNN anymore.

UPDATE: CNN plays the victim card. Sorry, guys. You still look like collaborators.

UPDATE: Stan writes: Even more shocking about CNN is that the CNN executive wrote the story for the New York Times. He blew the whistle on himself without even recognizing it. I think the fact that they don't even understand the enormity of their actions is worse than what they did. It shows that their moral compass has completely broken down. If their moral judgment is skewed this badly, it has to have an impact on their coverage of everything else. People who are so completely clueless in this particular case are very likely to be similarly clueless in most other stories, too.

UPDATE: The comments on CNN's cowardly collaboration posted over at Command-Post are rather brutal to CNN. One writer says, "I am finally realizing the appropriateness of the claim that Al Jazeera is the Middle East's equivalent of CNN." Another says, "This pretty much gives the lie to the 'brave journalists in Baghdad to bring the world the truth' claim. In fact, CNN now admits that A) they have routinely suppressed the hideous truth about the Baghdad regime precisely because there were CNN people in Iraq, and B) their presence routinely got Iraqis tortured and killed. One wonders why they were willing to risk Iraqi lives and prostitute themselves to Saddam's regime just to be able to say, 'We have people in Baghdad.' I wish I could believe they would engage in some soul-searching about this, but their arrogance and self-righteousness is such that I cannot imagine it happening." And another writes, simply, the truth: "CNN made a deal with the devil in exchange for 'access'."

UPDATE: Blaster's Blog has a good commentary on CNN's cowardice/complicity.

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs discusses CNN's collaborationist stance and has tons of great comments from readers.

UPDATE: James Taranto weighs in on the controversy.

UPDATE: Instapundit has some damning follow-up on Jordan, revealing the crass motivation behind CNN's decision to suck-up to Saddam. It had more to do with being No. 1 than with protecting anyone's life. Instapundit also has this reader reaction, which is pretty good. And Instapundit posted these links and comments later in the day.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg says it's a "journalistic Enron scandal."

UPDATE: Matt Welch says CNN's bureaus in the capitals of the world's dictators are really "propaganda huts."

UPDATE: Several bloggers are linking now to this piece from Oct. 28, 2002, in Slate, by Franklin Foer, which details the compromises CNN and other Western news media made in order to broadcast report from Baghdad. Here's just one of the damning factoids that make CNN and the others look really bad: They worked in, and broadcast from, the Iraqi Ministry of Information. They were housed in the heart of the Saddam terror regime's propaganda machine.

Foer also offers this passage that serves as an incredible damning of the way CNN and the rest pandered to Saddam's regime in order to maintain access:

There are alternatives to mindlessly reciting Baghdad's spin. Instead of desperately trying to keep their Baghdad offices open, the networks could scour Kurdistan and Jordan, where there are many recently arrived Iraqis who can talk freely. It's a method used by [French documentary filmmaker Joel] Soler in his documentary Uncle Saddam. After spending a month ingratiating himself with Saddam's entourage, Soler convinced the Iraqis to grant him camera time with His Excellency's inner circle. His film shows Saddam to be a lunatic, devoid of morality or humanity. It captures images of Saddam's unique style of fishing - hurling grenades into a pond and then sending aides to retrieve the kill. It documents Saddam's megalomania: Iraq's biggest paper features Saddam in a new pose on the cover each day. "I don't need a relationship with Iraq," he explains of his decision to bare all. "It was my one shot. Every day it was how can I push the limits."

To be sure, after screening his documentary for film festivals and Iraqi opposition groups in the U.S., Soler found red paint splattered on his Los Angeles home, his trash can set on fire, and a death threat in his mailbox. But with the film he smuggled out of Iraq via courier, Soler gives more psychological insight into Saddam than ten years of American TV reportage.

CNN put "access" and being No. 1 ahead of the welfare of 24 million Iraqis.

UPDATE: My very good long-time friend Roger L. Simon says CNN's "late-to-the-table apologia is despicable." Simon, a mystery novelist and screenwriter, continues: "CNN is arguably the most influential news organ in the world today. By obscuring or not reporting what was going on they jeopardized the lives of Iraqis all right - millions of them. They also helped keep the world misinformed by giving the impression that while the Saddam Regime was bad, it couldn't be that bad because, after all, CNN was still there. And, in so doing, they got to stay there, cementing their place as number one in all-news on one of the biggest international stories of the last several decades - greed at its purest."

Greed at its impurest, I'd say.

UPDATE: The New Republic, which carried the Franklin Foer piece mentioned above, is slamming CNN:

Tthe more you think about the piece, the more it starts to look like a pretty pathetic attempt by the network to preemptively cover its ass. After all, once all the details about Saddam's sadistic reign of terror start trickling out, people are inevitably going to wonder why CNN wasn't reporting this stuff all along. Far better to get the mea culpa over with sooner rather than later.