The Fall of CNN

The network was born in 1980 and gained viewers with live coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the rescue of baby Jessica McClure in 1987. In the 1980’s it was the only all news cable network in the world.

But, CNN didn’t garner international attention until the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent US led Gulf War in the winter of 1991.

CNN not only came to prominence during the Gulf War, they owned Gulf War news coverage.

The first Persian Gulf War in 1991 was a watershed event for CNN that catapulted the channel past the “Big Three” American networks for the first time in its history, largely due to an unprecedented, historical scoop: CNN was the only news outlet with the ability to communicate from inside Iraq during the initial hours of the Coalition bombing campaign, with live reports from the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad by reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman and Peter Arnett.

The moment when bombing began was announced on CNN by Bernard Shaw on January 16, 1991, as follows:[12]

This is Bernie Shaw. Something is happening outside. … Peter Arnett, join me here. Let’s describe to our viewers what we’re seeing… The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. … We’re seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky.

Because it was unable to immediately broadcast live pictures from Baghdad, CNN’s coverage of the initial hours of the Gulf War had the dramatic feel of a radio broadcast – and was compared to legendary CBS news anchor Edward R. Murrow‘s gripping live radio reports of the German bombing of London during World War II. Despite the lack of live pictures, CNN’s coverage was carried by television stations and networks around the world, resulting in CNN being watched by over a billion viewers worldwide.

CNN was taken so seriously as an ACCURATE, real time information source that it was sometimes used by military intelligence during the Gulf War, to the chagrin of General Schwarzkopf, who was tired of getting reports from CNN, rather than the vast multi-billion dollar intelligence community at his disposal.

CNN’s international, 24/7, respected news coverage continued through the 1990’s, 9-11 and the Iraq War.

While most of CNN’s staff were liberal, as are most people in the news industry, CNN made an attempt to maintain a middle of the road image, while Fox was conservative and MSNBC progressively…progressive.

That all changed with the candidacy and election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.

The network has been reborn as a left-wing, globalist propaganda ministry that would make the boys and girls from the old Soviet Pravda salivate with glee. CNN is the Deep State’s maskirovka arm for their war on Trump. When the Deep State says jump, CNN says how high.

CNN has come out of the closet as not only a liberal media outlet, but a network purveying lies, fabrications, deceit and daily deception about President Trump, his family and those in his cabinet.

CNN is not just the Clinton News Network, but much more. It has become the globalist go to outlet to push their policies of open borders, endless, unvetted Islamic immigration, trade deal death to the American worker and unhinged hatred for President Trump, Middle America, Brexit, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and of course, InfoWars.

CNN’s War on Trump is a war on freedom and it is being waged by a 24/7 campaign of fake news.

CNN owns the term Fake News. The fallen apostles of liberal larceny: Brian Stelter, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer (who at one time was a good reporter), Don ‘Intoxicated and Pierced’ Lemon and Anderson Cooper serve up a daily buffet of agitation and propaganda.

Then there’s the CNN East German Kangaroo Court, filled with liberal and globalist hacks like Fareed Zakariah who never met an open border he didn’t like, David ‘Oh So Establishment’ Gergen, Van ‘Whitelash’ Jones, Gloria Borger and S.E. Cupp, once a conservative, sort of liberal on CNN and soon to be whatever political persuasion she needs to be to get a really big pay check.

Of course we can’t forget CNN’s ace reporter, the Islamic apologist and citizen cannibal, Reza Aslan.

Jake Tapper’s hatred for President Trump is off the charts. The Lead with Jake Tapper is so full of slander and lies about the President that he makes Brian Williams of NBC look like the reincarnation of Honest Abe Lincoln.

Tapper is a snide, arrogant Ivy League clown who has become Jeff Zucker’s Gunga Din, carrying a bucket of slime and putrid water in the hopes that he will become the nation’s next Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite, while a liberal, had scruples. Tapper has the moral compass of a Saigon whore. He is nothing more than a WASP sleaze ball in a Botany 500 suit.

Tapper can’t get enough of the Trump and Russia story. He is convinced Trump has been colluding with Russia for years and only because of Russian hacking did Hillary somehow lose the election. Tapper is not just running with the Deep State maskirvoka about Russia, he is sprinting with it, holding it to his chest like he’s purloined the Crown Jewels, when all he really has is a pile of Fool’s Gold.

Someone needs to tell Mr. Tapper that there is ZERO, yes ZERO proof that Mr. Trump has or had any involvement at all with anyone or anything from Russia.

Tapper is also convinced that President Trump’s wiretapping claims are all lies. A good, patriotic Kenyan like Barack Obama would never resort to such despicable Deep State tactics.

Stay tuned to House Intelligence Committee revelations on the subject this week, Jake.

The list of fake news stories produced by CNN in the last few months is astounding.

Only days ago, CNN ran with the fake news story that Fox News’s Sean Hannity had once pulled a gun on liberal columnist and Fox News contributor, Juan Williams. Williams was quick to denounce the story for what it was, more CNN lies.

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing.

(CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears”

Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

CNN ran a story saying that Trump supporters were considering boycotting Pepsi over comments that the CEO of the company never actually made.

Sirius XM host Howard Stern and news anchor Robin Quivers slammed CNN for running a misleading headline about comments Donald Trump made on his program in 2002 around the Iraq War.

On Sept. 29, CNN.com ran a story with the headline “Howard Stern Says Trump Backed Iraq War In 2002.” But as Stern noted on his popular radio program, he can’t understand “how CNN came up with that headline.”

CNN also ran a story about a professor predicting Donald Trump’s impeachment just days after Mr. Trump won the White House.

Finally, and what would be funny, if it wasn’t so deviously sickening, is CNN’s recent segment, titled, ‘Is Fake News fooling Kids?’ CNN ought to know, they’re the Number One creators of fake news in the world.

CNN’s fake news isn’t doing the network any good. Their ratings still fall vastly behind Fox News, and as of last week, behind MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and her ‘mailbox’ full of tax return pages from 1990.

CNN’s reputation is gone, done, finished and with it the reputations of Mr. Zucker, Tapper, Lemon, Cooper, Blitzer, Zakaria and Gergen. It’s rapidly sinking to the bottom of the Marianas Trench for eternity.

If the network is to ever return to its golden days of actual serious and largely neutral news coverage, new ownership must purge its employees from top to toe.

“CNN’s international, 24/7, respected news coverage continued through the 1990’s, 9-11 and the Iraq War.”

The author is an idiot.

Eason Jordan, CNN CEO, admitted in a NY TIMES editorial that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-to-ourselves.html

The News We Kept To Ourselves

By EASON JORDAN APRIL 11, 2003

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).

Continue reading the main story
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.

“CNN’s international, 24/7, respected news coverage continued through the 1990’s, 9-11 and the Iraq War.”

The author is an idiot.

CNN’s Iraqi Cover-Up

Media Critiques April 15, 2003
http://honestreporting.com/cnns-iraqi-cover-up/

In a shocking New York Times opinion piece, CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan has admitted that for the past decade the network has systematically covered up stories of Iraqi atrocities. Reports of murder, torture, and planned assassinations were suppressed in order to maintain CNN’s Baghdad bureau.

Read Jordan’s op-ed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html

Jordan has not always been so candid — nor honest. Just six months ago on public radio, when challenged regarding the veracity of CNN’s Baghdad reports, Jordan stated:

“CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine; that it’s prepared to be forthright… 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 [in Iraq].”
http://wnyc.org/onthemedia/transcripts_102502_jordan.html

Below, HonestReporting presents a series of op-ed columns and editorials condemning CNN’s policy. At the end of this communique is a response that CNN’s Eason Jordan sent to HonestReporting.

Now that this senior CNN executive has come clean, it leaves us wondering: In what other regions ruled by terrorist dictators do the media toe the party line so as to remain in good stead? It is known that the Palestinian Authority, since its very establishment, has employed brutal methods of intimidation against journalists.

For specific examples, see HonestReporting’s expose, “Palestinian Intimidation of the Press”:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/reports/Palestinian_Intimidation_of_the_Press.asp

Have the major international news agencies also withheld information on the PA in order to stay on good terms with Arafat’s henchmen? As HonestReporting chronicled on another occasion, CNN has at the very least lent credence to patent lies stated by the Palestinian Authority:
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiques/Broadcasting_the_Big_Lie.asp

Now that CNN has turned sincere, admitting it buried stories that would smear Mideast dictators, perhaps the time has come for more comprehensive, honest reporting in the region.

HonestReporting encourages members to respond to the Jordan admission by demanding that media agencies report the facts, including efforts to intimidate Mideast journalists. If news agencies must buy access to dictators’ regions through the omission of telling violence, we must insist that they either report the truth, or leave.

==== OP-EDS AND EDITORIALS ====

(1) Some of the most damning evidence against CNN comes from a Washington Times op-ed by Peter Collins (“Corruption at CNN – April 15, 2003 – http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030415-91009640.htm). Collins briefly worked for the network in Baghdad and sat in on talks involving executives Eason Jordan and Tom Johnson, who were trying to negotiate an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein:

“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.”

(2) In the Wall Street Journal (“CNN’s Access of Evil” – http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003336), Franklin Foer writes:

“For a long time, CNN denied that its coverage skimped on truth. While I researched a story on CNN’s Iraq coverage for the New Republic last October, Mr. Jordan told me flatly that his network gave ‘a full picture of the regime.’ In our conversation, he challenged me to find instances of CNN neglecting stories about Saddam’s horrors. If only I’d had his Times op-ed!…

“For nearly a decade, the [CNN] network gave credulous treatment to orchestrated anti-U.S. protests. When Saddam won his most recent ‘election,’ CNN’s Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf treated the event as meaningful: ‘The point is that this really is a huge show of support’ and ‘a vote of defiance against the United States.’ After Saddam granted amnesty to prisoners in October, she reported, this ‘really does diffuse one of the strongest criticisms over the past decades of Iraq’s human-rights records’.”

(3) Commentator Marc J. Rauch writes:

“Like all the other similarities that exist between the despotic Arab regimes, Yasser Arafat and the PLO employ the exact same fear tactics [as Saddam]. They kill and torture anyone they can get their hands on that disseminates a dissenting opinion. It’s impossible to think that CNN hasn’t received additional threats from Arafat, and that CNN isn’t also caving into this pressure to protect their precious network, by covering up more truths.”

(4) HonestReporting member Arnold Roth, whose teenage daughter was killed in the Palestinian terrorist attack at Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant, writes:

“Over the past 18 months, since the Sbarro massacre, my wife Frimet and I have grown increasingly appalled at the display of poor journalistic and ethical values of a procession of reporters, photographers, journalists and media analysts. Some of them have misreported on events about which we had personal knowledge. Others have come to our home or invited us to their studios and directly interviewed us — and then did disgraceful things with the material they collected. CNN and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are at the top of a depressingly long list.

“After a disclosure as broad-reaching and shocking as Eason Jordan’s, why would we trust anything that comes from CNN? By covering up these stories, CNN helped the evil regime of Saddam Hussein remain in power, for no other reason than sheer cowardice. CNN believed — wrongly and reprehensibly — that remaining in Baghdad was more important that reporting the truth.

“CNN and Eason Jordan are certainly not alone. From personal knowledge, some of the biggest media names regularly, consistently tell lies and deny it. This is especially true in relation to how they report on the Palestinian Arab war of terror against our children. This continues until today. It will go on until ordinary people like you and me speak out and demand that it ends. Every one of us needs to consider carefully what we can do. But doing something constructive is imperative.”

(5) Jeff Jacoby, writing in The Boston Globe (Trading Truth For Access? – http://www.boston.c
om/dailyglobe2/107/oped/Trading_truth_for_access_+.shtml), notes the testimony of Thomas Friedman, who described in his 1989 best seller “From Beirut to Jerusalem” what it was like to be a reporter in Beirut during the years when southern Lebanon was dominated by Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Syria’s Palestinian loyalists.

“No discussion about the reality of Beirut reporting would be complete,” he wrote, “without mentioning a major reporting constraint journalists there faced: physical intimidation.” He explained, for example, how Syria’s agents dealt with one journalist they didn’t like: He was found with a bullet in his head and his writing hand mutilated with acid. Earlier, Friedman recalled his own terror on learning that Arafat’s spokesman wanted to see him “immediately” about the stories he’d been filing to New York:

“I lay awake in my bed the whole night worrying that someone was going to burst in and blow my brains all over the wall.”

“There were… stories which were deliberately ignored out of fear. Here I will be the first to say `mea culpa.’ How many serious stories were writen from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the PLO leadership…? It would be hard to find any hint of them in Beirut reporting before the Israeli invasion.”

And Friedman’s most damning admission: “The truth is, the Western press coddled the PLO… For any Beirut-based correspondent, the name of the game was keeping on good terms with the PLO, because without it would you not get the interview with Arafat you wanted when your foreign editor came to town.”

(6) A pair of Washington Times editorials (April 14 and 15) note:

“For the last twelve years, CNN has provided the West with the dominant news image of Saddam’s Iraq. But, now we know… 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.”

“Former CNN Baghdad correspondent Peter Collins makes a strong case that Mr. Jordan is lying when he denies that ensuring access was a motive for CNN’s shading of the truth on Iraq… Collins adds that, the following day, when he factually reported that Iraqi charges that American war planes were bombing “innocent Iraqi farmers” were false (it turned out that the “farm” in question was most likely a location for Iraqi missile batteries), CNN correspondent Brent Sadler rebuked him.”

(7) Eric Fettmann writes in the New York Post (“Craven News Network” – April 12) that Eason Jordan’s revelation is “like saying that the best interests of journalism would have justified suppressing stories on the Holocaust during World War II in order to keep a U.S. news bureau in Berlin so as to be able to tell Nazi Germany’s side of the story… This astonishing confession doesn’t just undermine CNN’s claim to be “the most trusted name in news” – it wreaks incalculable damage on all journalists’ ability to be trusted… Indeed, CNN’s silence seems to have cost as many lives as it may have saved.”

(8) Margaret Wente writes in Canada’s Globe and Mail (“Saddam’s silent collaborators” – April 15) of the children’s prison in Baghdad where the regime locked up the kids of parents deemed disloyal to the regime, and tortured them. She questions why for years CNN and others didn’t report on “the children’s screams” even though they were known about. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, for example, said he knew about the children’s prison because his team inspected it in 1998. He once said it was the most horrific thing he had seen. “Probably 200 kids from toddlers to 12-year-olds. The stench was unreal –urine, feces, vomit, sweat. The kids were howling and dying of thirst. We threw water in there, but the Iraqis probably took the water out afterwards.”

==== EASON JORDAN RESPONDS =====

To: action@honestreporting.com
From: Eason.Jordan@turner.com

Since you chose to circulate two mass e-mails attacking my NY Times op-ed piece on CNN’s Iraq horror stories, I ask that you consider distributing my response to the controversy.

Since my op-ed piece in the New York Times Friday stirred a controversy, I want to share my thoughts with you about it. In the op-ed, I described how the Iraqi regime intimidated, tortured, and killed people who helped CNN over the years. It was a tough piece to write. But I felt strongly the stories needed to be told as soon as telling them would not automatically result in the killing of innocent colleagues, friends, and acquaintances — most of them Iraqis.

Some critics complain that the op-ed piece proves CNN withheld vital information from the public and kowtowed to the Saddam Hussein regime to maintain a CNN reporting presence in Iraq. That is nonsense. No news organization in the world had a more contentious relationship with the Iraqi regime than CNN. The Iraqi leadership was so displeased with CNN’s Iraq reporting, CNN was expelled from Iraq six times — five times in previous years and one more time on day three of this Iraq war. Those expulsions lasted as long as six months at a time. CNN’s Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, was banned from the country in response to her reporting on an unprecedented public protest demanding to know what happened to Iraqis who vanished years earlier after being abducted by Iraqi secret police. Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Aaron Brown, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson, Rym Brahimi, Sheila MacVicar, Ben Wedeman, and Richard Roth were among the other CNN correspondents and anchors banned from Iraq. If CNN were trying to kowtow and maintain its Baghdad presence at any cost, would CNN’s reporting have produced a contentious relationship, expulsions, and bannings? No. CNN kept pushing for access in Iraq, while never compromising its journalistic standards in doing so. Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin.

Did CNN report on the brutality of the regime? Yes, as best we could, mostly from outside Iraq, where people in the know could speak more freely than people inside Iraq. In Saddam’s Iraq, no one was foolish enough to speak on camera or on the record about the brutality of the regime because anyone doing so would be effectively signing his or her death warrant. So we reported on Iraq’s human rights record from outside Iraq and featured many interviews with Iraqi defectors who described the regime’s brutality in graphic detail. When an Iraqi official, Abbas al-Janabi, defected after his teeth were yanked out with pliers by Uday Saddam Hussein’s henchmen, I worked to ensure the defector gave his first TV interview to CNN. He did. I also personally asked Tariq Aziz in a live TV interview during one of our World Report Conferences to defend his country’s dreadful human rights record. Other CNNers over the years also put tough questions to Iraqi officials.

Some critics say if I had told my Iraq horror stories sooner, I would have saved thousands of lives. How they come to that conclusion, I don’t know. Iraq’s human rights record and the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime were well known before I wrote my op-ed piece. The only sure thing that would have happened if I told those stories sooner is the regime would have tracked down and killed the innocent people who told me those stories. Critics say I could have told the stories without identifying Iraqis by name. But the Iraqi secret police surely knew everyone I met in Iraq and would have had no trouble identifying who told me the stories. No doubt those people would be dead today if I spoke sooner.

A number of people have told me CNN should have closed its Baghdad bureau, helped everyone who told me the horror stories flee Iraq, with me thereafter telling those stories publicly long before now. While that is a noble thought, doing so was not a viable option. Iraqis (and their families) who told me those stories in some cases could not, and in other cases would not, leave their country simply for the sake of CNN being able to share their stories with the world. Incidentally, there are countless such horror stories in Iraq. I knew just a few of them. We will hear many more of them in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Knowing the personal stories I knew about the brutality of the regime, I had three options: 1. Never repeat such horror stories. 2. Tell the stories sooner and, as a result, see innocent people killed. 3. Tell the stories after the downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime. I chose option three and could never imagine doing anything else.

I chose to write the NY Times op-ed to provide a record of one person’s experiences with the brutality of the Iraqi regime and to ensure we maintain CNN’s long record of reporting on atrocities around the world, even if in these cases we could do so only years later to protect the lives of innocent people.

Eason

“CNN’s international, 24/7, respected news coverage continued through the 1990’s, 9-11 and the Iraq War.”

The author is an idiot.

CNN Executive Resigns Post Over Remarks

By JACQUES STEINBERG and KATHARINE Q. SEELYEFEB. 12, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/12/business/media/cnn-executive-resigns-post-over-remarks.html?_r=0

Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who was responsible for coordinating the cable network’s Iraq coverage, resigned abruptly last night, citing a journalistic tempest he touched off during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, late last month in which he appeared to suggest that United States troops had deliberately aimed at journalists, killing some.

Though no transcript of Mr. Jordan’s remarks at Davos on Jan. 27 has been released, the panel’s moderator, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, said in an interview last night that Mr. Jordan had initially spoken of soldiers, “on both sides,” who he believed had been “targeting” some of the more than four dozen journalists killed in Iraq.

Almost immediately after making that assertion, Mr. Jordan, whose title at CNN had been executive vice president and chief news executive, “quickly walked that back to make it clear that there was no policy on the part of the U.S. government to target or injure journalists,” Mr. Gergen said.

Mr. Jordan was then challenged by Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who was in the audience. Mr. Jordan then said that he had intended to say only that some journalists had been killed by American troops who did not know they were aiming their weapons at journalists.

Continue reading the main story
Nonetheless, accounts of Mr. Jordan’s remarks were soon being reported on Web logs as well as in an article on Feb. 3 on National Review’s Web site. Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that 54 journalists were killed in 2003 and 2004 . At least nine died as a result of American fire, she said.

Among Mr. Jordan’s responsibilities at CNN was be an advocate — often a forceful one — in discussions with the Pentagon on issues concerning the security of journalists in Iraq.

In a memorandum released to his colleagues last night, Mr. Jordan, 44, who had worked at the network for more than two decades, said he had “decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq.”

In a separate e-mail message to the staff, Jim Walton, president of the CNN News Group, a division of Time Warner, announced Mr. Jordan’s resignation, which took effect immediately, before praising his 23 years of service at the network.

In accepting Mr. Jordan’s resignation, CNN appeared intent on putting the episode behind it as quickly as possible, perhaps in an effort to avoid repeating the drawn-out tensions last fall between CBS News and the Bush administration, as well as its conservative supporters.

After broadcasting a report in early September that was critical of President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, CBS defended the report, in the face of criticism on Web logs, for more than a week before announcing that it could not substantiate it. Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, subsequently announced that he would step down as of March 9, and CBS announced its had fired one producer and was seeking the resignations of three others after an outside report it had commissioned found serious fault with the reporting process behind the Guard broadcast.

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Asked last night if CNN had had any contact with the Bush administration over the fallout from Mr. Jordan’s remarks, a network spokeswoman, Christa Robinson, said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

Asked if Mr. Jordan had been under any pressure from the network to resign, Ms. Robinson said the decision had been his. She said Mr. Walton, the CNN president, was unavailable for further comment. Mr. Jordan did not return a message left on his cellphone seeking comment. Mr. Jordan, who once had day-to-day responsibility for CNN’s international coverage, is no stranger to controversy.

In April 2003, he wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times saying that CNN had essentially suppressed news of brutalities in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, saying he thought the reports could have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on CNN’s Baghdad staff.

“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me,” he wrote. “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.”

When reports of Mr. Jordan’s more recent remarks began reaching the United States via the Internet, some of his colleagues, citing the previous controversy, responded with palpable irritation and mystification, though not with comments they would permit to be attributed to them by name, given the sensitivity of the situation.

For CNN, the online reports — as well as the only interview Mr. Jordan has given on the subject, for an article in The Washington Post — have come at an especially inopportune time. In November, the network named Jonathan Klein, a former CBS news executive, as president of its domestic network. (His predecessor had been appointed only a little over a year earlier.)

It also gave him an ambitious assignment: to reclaim the ratings lead it yielded years ago to the Fox News Channel, whose commentators, at least, tend to tilt to the right.

Bret Stephens, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who attended the session in Davos, wrote in Thursday’s Journal that Mr. Jordan had “made a defamatory innuendo” but added: “Mr. Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making.”

“CNN’s international, 24/7, respected news coverage continued through the 1990’s, 9-11 and the Iraq War.”

The author is an idiot.

Jordan and the real CNN story: Marzullo reveals network’s history of covering up truth

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Tuesday, April 15, 2003 | Tom Marzullo
Posted on 4/15/2003, 3:05:07 AM by JohnHuang2
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/893425/posts

For all of those who have placed their trust in the news reported by CNN for more than a decade, the revelations of its deceit by senior news executive Eason Jordan has been more than shocking. On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, a fellow journalist bemoans the fact that he was assured by Jordan that CNN published “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” to his face.

But you ain’t heard nothing yet …

Described by a wide variety of media types as setting a new watermark in disingenuous journalistic tap dancing, Jordan’s piece in the New York Times attempts to paint CNN in a heroic light, saying they were just trying to “save lives.”

Unfortunately for CNN the reality is known.

The reality is that CNN’s integrity was long ago sunk to the shadowy depths, where truth was such a barely seen, faintly dappled furtive commodity that when Jordan bumped into it, he was so startled and fearful of its light that he ran from it.

OK, OK, I’ll cut out the literary metaphors and just get down to it.

Where Iraq is concerned, CNN has now admitted to rarely publishing the truth, preferring to parrot the party line of one who they personally knew was a bloody maniac with terrible weapons and plans.

Doing “Baghdad Bob” one better, Jordan brazenly and habitually lied to fellow journalists about the integrity of his network’s reporting, a cardinal sin in the trade.

What you don’t know – and they didn’t say – is that Jordan and CNN willfully turned from knowing the truth even when it was literally pounding at their door.

Some of you may recall CNN’s 1998 historic journalistic disaster exposed by Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily, wherein Peter Arnett, April Oliver and Jack Smith (aided and abetted by CNN’s CEO, president and Jordan) cooked up a story that wouldn’t have passed muster in a high-school newspaper.

This internationally pimped fiction launched (and sunk) the new CNN-TIME venture and its flagship program, NewsStand, where they claimed that the United States had used sarin nerve gas to murder its own soldiers — as well as women and children — and Arnett’s introductory manipulation provided the political means for Saddam to oust the United Nations’ weapons inspectors. CNN’s own military adviser, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith resigned in protest after his attempts to show the literal truth to CEO Tom Johnson were flatly rejected out of hand.

CNN was eventually forced to retreat from their story under the cover of 60 pages of carefully crafted legalistic mumbo-jumbo while muttering that they just couldn’t prove it, yet. Yet, why would they place their integrity on the line over such a damning story that they could not back up with fact?

Interestingly, CNN only retracted their busted story domestically – internationally, they stood their ground. Even in England, the London Times had to be forced to publish the retraction by the government after an expatriate Special Forces veteran demanded redress.

Peter Arnett publicly claimed not have had anything to do the writing of the story, but I ensured that ABC got a verified photograph of Arnett and Oliver conducting an interview that would have immediately sunk that story in any media outlet with acceptable journalistic ethics.

But it gets better still …

A little more than a month after their “Tailwind” story blew up in their faces – Perry Smith used his remaining influence at CNN to get me in to talk to Eason Jordan and the company’s PR flak in the offices at the Atlanta headquarters. The purpose of that meeting was to give CNN a chance to recover their badly damaged credibility and to restore their network to profitability once more.

My motivation was simple: I wanted them to publish the truth that would remove some of the taint on my country and fellow veterans.

The benefit to them was that they were put on the fast track to business recovery, a classic win-win scenario.

The plan was to send an independently monitored team to Laos and Vietnam, do a forensic examination of the site of the “Tailwind” battle site and interview the survivors of that battle no matter what side they were on. The expertise was already lined up; the plan doable; the cost was under $8 million. Considering that CNN had already lost $100 million in an uncontrolled hemorrhage (that would eventually run into the multi-billions) this was truly a gift.

But to Jordan and CNN executives, the plan had a fatal flaw, because they were required to find the unvarnished truth and broadcast it – all of it. This was something they were not prepared to do then – or by Jordan’s own admission, even now.

Given all of the incontrovertible facts now in evidence about their blatantly destructive partisan actions and connection to the defunct Iraqi regime, CNN and Jordon may make journalistic history yet again.

If a federal prosecutor with a backbone can be found, CNN et al may become the first media giant to be brought before the bar for acting as enemy agents.

Even to suggest this will cause the ambiance of CNN executive suites to emulate that of a chorus of scorched cats. It’s about time.

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