“For the last twelve years, CNN has provided the West with the dominant news image of Saddam’s Iraq. It was the jewel in the crown of CNN’s international reporting reputation.
“But, now we know, from the unwitting pen of CNN’s morally obtuse chief news executive, that it was always a false image CNN was broadcasting. The hard news was kept secret. The propaganda flowed like wine.
“CNN was running a straight propaganda-for-profits deal with Saddam. Until CNN brings in honest news executives, no prudent viewer should trust CNN’s current and future reporting from other foreign capitals.”
– Excerpts from the Washington Times’ House Editorial, April 14, 2003
While confession is good for the soul, left-wing CNN still has a lot to learn about the basic tenets of journalism: Fairness, balance, accuracy, objectivity, honesty and integrity.
On April 11, this long-time Fifth Column of the Fourth Estate – which sanctimoniously anointed itself “The Most Trusted Name in News” – dropped a major bombshell. In a New York Times op-ed, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan cravenly admitted to a deliberate media embargo of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities for 12 long years – even covering up brutalities perpetrated against its own staff to secure prime real estate in the newly-liberated, albeit, blood-soaked city.
But its blatantly censored canards weren’t exactly meant to prevent any further harm to its employees and Iraqi citizens by the regime’s thugs, as Hussein’s Useful Idiot Jordan purported – and later distorted. Its sole purpose was to keep a Bush-bashing, anti-American, pro-Saddam-appeasing presence in Baghdad, even if it meant ignoring the likely slaughter of countless more innocent Iraqi civilians.
“It’s a classic example of selling your soul for the story,” observed Townhall.com columnist Charles Krauthammer. “[Jordan] clearly gave up truth for access.”
Although the spineless Jordan shot himself in the foot for coming up short of full disclosure for his anti-American posturing with Iraq, CNN, Big Media’s best little whorehouse in Baghdad, is displaying further evidence of the liberal media’s across-the-board dereliction of duty.
Now, with CNN wiping egg off its face and eating crow, the rest of the Blame-America-First leftist press will ultimately fall – and it’s just around the corner.
CNN’s top pimp of propaganda sells out
The firestorm began when Jordan revealed in a New York Times op-ed piece that his culpable cable network genuflected to the Iraqi despot’s demands for positive coverage of its murderous regime in exchange for access.
(Read Jordan’s entire statement without first setting up a New York Times Web account.)
After having made these 13 trips to Baghdad, CNN, Iraq’s own private Samizdat, eventually cowered and sealed an unwritten – and unreported – sweetheart deal to censor anti-Iraqi news items, thus compromising the slightest vestige of journalistic credibility.
Even more telling, in an interview last October with WNYC Radio, Jordan disingenuously said:
“[W]e 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.”
In fact, CNN’s new boss Jim Walton told the Boston Globe in January that he would strive to keep the network’s coverage objective (in light of Fox News consistently trouncing them in the ratings).
“What I would tell you is I will always push CNN to be accurate and balanced,” Walton hypocritically told the Globe on Jan. 16.
Now, Jordan, still showing no signs of contrition over his treasonous incompetence, appeared on C-SPAN on April 16 and made imbecilic excuses for why he allowed his network to propagandize its reports under the guise of protecting unsuspecting Iraqi lives.
But breaking down Jordan’s declaration of guilt reveals far more unsettling details of the worst acts of journalistic recklessness, as CNN’s unethically self-imposed exculpation continue.
CNN denied Iraqis the opportunity to decide their own destiny
According to a Washington Times house editorial, had CNN told the Iraqi people the truth about Hussein’s murderous regime, these civilians would have likely turned on him:
“…As the chief news executive of the only truly worldwide television news network, Mr. Jordan was literally the one man in the entire world in a position to “unbottle” those awful truths. Moreover, those awful truths were not only newsworthy, but would have been history-making – had they been reported…
“So deeply had Mr. Jordan morally compromised himself and CNN that Uday the psychopath felt comfortable confiding his highest-visibility murder plans to Mr. Jordan. His secrets were safe with CNN. What a scoop they missed: “Son of Saddam Hussein plans to murder King of Jordan.”
Moreover, the New Republic’s Franklin Foer wrote that Jordan shouldn’t expect his after-the-fact admission to get him any ethical journalism trophies, since CNN had long denied that its coverage skimped on truth:
“Would that this were an outbreak of honesty, however belated. But it isn’t. If it were, Mr. Jordan wouldn’t be portraying CNN as Saddam’s victim. He’d be apologizing for its cooperation with Iraq’s erstwhile information ministry–and admitting that CNN policy hinders truthful coverage of dictatorships. For CNN, the highest prize is “access,” to score live camera feeds from a story’s epicenter.
“Dictatorships understand this hunger, and also that it provides blackmail opportunities. In exchange for CNN bureaus, dictatorships require adherence to their own rules of reportage. They create conditions where CNN–and other U.S. media–can do little more than toe the regime’s line.”
Ironically, long before Jordan’s midnight confession, Foer wrote a piece last fall about how some CNN correspondents were actually afraid of criticizing the Iraqi regime. Foer reported, however, that there were some CNN reporters – desperate to stake their claim in Baghdad – who easily compromised standard journalistic ethics to stay in the rogue state.
In his Oct. 16, 2002 article in the New Republic titled, “How Saddam Manipulates the U.S. Media,” Foer agreed that there’s nothing unusual about reporters ingratiating themselves to a source. But CNN correspondent Jane Arraf’s currying for access was a little over the top when she ran a story last year on the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War that included a nearly congratulatory section on Hussein:
“He, too, endures. More than a symbol, a powerful force who has survived three major U.S.-led attacks since the Gulf war, bombing, and plots to depose him. At 63, the president mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf war, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding.”
In her report reviewing Hussein’s past ten years, Arraf included no mention of his butchery that is well documented in Human Rights Watch reports and in dozens of books:
“From her telling, you’d think he’s the Robert Moses of Mesopotamia,” Foer wrote. “In fact, even Arraf herself seems to know that what she is saying is probably bunk. Last March she published a piece in London’s Daily Telegraph (which the Iraqi Ministry of Information apparently missed), in which she outlined the near impossibility of reporting honestly on Saddam’s regime.”
Foer concluded that many of Arraf’s colleagues commit the same egregious errors, treating regime-organized demonstrations as if they were genuine expressions of public opinion.
Jordan forced former CNN correspondent to recite Iraqi propaganda
All the more telling is former CNN Baghdad correspondent Peter Collins’ firsthand account in the April 15, 2003 edition of the Washington Times of longstanding corruption amongst the CNN brass. Collins detailed how CNN executives’ endless kowtowing to get an exclusive with the murderous despot – to the point of obsession.
In January 1993, Collins said he took part in meetings between CNN President Tom Johnson and Jordan, then chief of international news gathering, and various officials purported to be close to Hussein, meeting with his personal translator; with a foreign affairs adviser; with Information Minister Latif Jassim; and with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz:
According to Collins, in each of these meetings, Johnson and Jordan made their pitch for Hussein. Collins would only have an hour’s time on CNN’s worldwide network, and there would be no interruptions and no commercials.
“I was astonished,” Collins said about his CNN employers’ audacity. And judging by both the tone and the content of these conversations, it seemed to Collins that CNN was virtually prostituting itself for the interview:
“The day after one such meeting, I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first “live shot” on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. “Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera,” he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.
“The list was so long that there was no time during the live shot to provide context. I read the information minister’s points verbatim. Moments later, I was downstairs in the newsroom on the first floor of the Information Ministry. Mr. Johnson approached, having seen my performance on a TV monitor. “You were a bit flat there, Peter,” he said. Again, I was astonished. The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein’s propaganda.“
Unequivocally, CNN’s latest debacle reveals many other questionable aspects of the complicit network. For example, it also explains the farcical hiring of former CNN war correspondent Peter Arnett.
Last month, Arnett was rightfully fired from NBC and National Geographic for suspicious statements made on Iraqi TV that placated to the brutal regime. It also makes you wonder if Arnett and CNN knew about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Remember Arnett’s 1998 fabricated story about U.S. troops allegedly using sarin nerve gas to murder its own soldiers, as well as innocent Iraqi citizens?
WorldNetDaily.com’s Tom Marzullo reported on April 15 that Arnett’s introductory manipulation provided the political means for Hussein to oust the United Nations’ weapons inspectors. In fact, Marzullo reported that CNN’s own military adviser, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith resigned in protest after his attempts to show CNN’s Johnson the literal truth were flatly rejected.
More recently, CNN reported on April 14 that 11 chemical-bio weapons labs have been found in the Iraqi town of Karbal “and they’ve been buried to escape detection.”
“I’m wondering how long has CNN known this?” Rush Limbaugh said. “It is a legitimate question now.”
CNN’s weapons of mass disinformation
Speaking of weapons of “mass disinformation,” it also explains the bellicose, anti-Bush rants – as well as the continued employment – of CNN’s rabidly liberal anchors Aaron Brown, Wolf Blitzer, Jeff Greenberg, Judy Woodruff and Paula Zahn – without any accountability for their slanted talking points they pass off as “news.”
It also explains the Clinton News Network’s ratcheting up its vitriolic bemoaning of the skyrocketing success of Fox News. Why does CNN marvel at Fox News’ success? After all, when news is being reported from both sides, it’s not so surprising that people – hungry for objective news coverage – would flock to where they will hear fair and balanced reporting.
Besides, if CNN couldn’t safely and effectively report the truth about Iraqi atrocities, while keeping its correspondents free from subsequent retribution, Jordan and his other CNN accomplices had a moral and ethical obligation to immediately remove them from Baghdad. The fact that the CNN brass chose otherwise – just to maintain access – is irresponsible as well as unconscionable.
Contemporaneously, as long as CNN insists on committing professional suicide by not being forthcoming in its “news” coverage, its ratings will not only continue to plummet, its mislead viewers will be switching them off in droves. If it insists on abandoning all truth telling for broadcasting patent lies, it will sooner or later cease to exist.
Now, CNN has lost all credibility, even if its fellow leftist listeners choose to watch its distorted coverage. Much like the Clinton-Gore era, CNN’s legacy will be hard to spin.
Newsmax.com columnist Wilson C. Lucom, on March 21, 2003, said it best when he called on CNN to stop broadcasting pro-Iraq, anti-American propaganda:
“CNN is an American TV network. It is not chartered by the U.N. or internationally. Its loyalty is to the United States. If it is not loyal to the United States, its charter should immediately be canceled.
“CNN is definitely unpatriotic and perhaps traitorous when it broadcasts the propaganda statements of the enemy on American TV. These broadcasts give aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war and should definitely be stopped. It is all right for CNN to go into battle with the American armed forces but not to telecast enemy propaganda as news.
“I demand that CNN immediately stop these traitorous TV broadcasts, which give aid and comfort to the enemy. The propaganda statements that are being forced on the American people can wrongly cause them to stop supporting the president in time of war. This could be regarded as traitorous.”
But if CNN and the rest of its media cohorts of the Left had their way, hundreds of innocent Iraqi children would still be imprisoned, women would continue to be raped and tortured, and millions more would be brutally murdered – all in the name of protecting sources to gain access.
“Even if CNN ignores the moral costs of working with such regimes, it should at least pay attention to the practical costs,” Foer wrote. “These governments only cooperate with CNN because it suits their short-term interests. They don’t reward loyalty. It wasn’t surprising, then, that the Information Ministry booted CNN from Baghdad in the war’s first days.
“In a way CNN’s absence at this pivotal moment provides a small measure of justice: The network couldn’t use its own cameras to cover the fall of a regime that it had treated with such astonishing respect.”
CNN’s culpability again knows no bounds. If it’s willing to hide vital information about murderous despots like Iraq, what else is it concealing from its dwindling audience, the Bush Administration (which it continues to undermine) and the newly liberated Iraqi people?
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”