April 28, 2003
The most trusted name in news--that’s the motto of CNN. Or at least it was until Chief News Executive of the network, Eason Jordan, wrote an op/ed piece in the New York Times, entitled "The News We Kept to Ourselves". In the article, published on April 11, Jordan reveals that CNN learned details of some terrible atrocities that were committed by the former regime in Iraq on its own citizens, but the network felt that they could not report it. According to the news chief, "awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."
Jordan then went on to reveal an incident during the 1990s when an Iraqi cameraman was abducted and tortured. Jordan said, "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."
The most shocking revelation by the CNN exec was that Saddam’s son, Uday, had told him that he intended to have his two brother-in-laws who fled the country, killed, as well as King Hussein of Jordan, who had provided them with asylum. Jordan, of course couldn't tip off the brother-in-laws, but he did tell King Hussein because "I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan’s monarch, and I did so the next day." Unlike King Hussein, who later died a natural death, the brother-in-laws, were forgiven, welcomed back to Iraq, and murdered shortly after their return.
Eason Jordan feels just awful about all this stuff but makes no apologies. In a memo to his staff that went out shortly after the negative reaction to his op/ed piece, Jordan states that he saved lives and besides, everyone knows about Saddam’s atrocities any way. What rationalization.
If everyone knows everything they need to know about a certain subject, why report it at all? Why doesn’t CNN abandon the Laci Peterson story? We all know that the pregnant Laci went missing last Christmas Eve, that her body and that of her unborn son washed up on a beach, that her husband Scott has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and that he probably did it. So unless or until he gets acquitted, why bother reporting anything? That, of course, won’t happen. The public’s right to know means that CNN reporters will camp outside the jail and ask whether Scott had a good night’s sleep. But, apparently this doesn’t apply to torture and murder.
When you look at some people, like Liberal MP Colleen Beaumier, who fawned all over former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, you have to wonder whether, if the networks had constantly been reporting stories of atrocities, the true nature of the Iraqi regime would have sunk in to allegedly intelligent members of the regime’s fan club like Beaumier. We’ll never know.
By operating the way that they did, CNN ceased to do what journalists are supposed to do--report the facts so that the audience can make informed judgments about the world around them. By ignoring the truth, and sucking up to Iraqi leaders and officials, CNN became just another cog in the Iraqi propaganda machine.
As has been suggested, it could have been handled another way. CNN could have simply withdrawn from Iraq if they felt that they could not report the truth. The government of Iraq was good at getting its propaganda out. The significance of the Dan Rather interview of Saddam Hussein to CBS was not anything Saddam said, but the fact that Rather got to interview him. Had CNN really wanted to report the truth, they could have remained in neighbouring countries and interviewed Iraqi exiles. The National Post’s Mark Steyn put it best--the important thing was not what was being reported, but the sign-off--"Jane Araff, CNN, Baghdad".
If CNN operated that way in Iraq, their reporting from other totalitarian states can’t be trusted either. Perhaps they should get another Chief News Executive--or at least another motto..