Posted on 02/12/2005 12:42:48 PM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
WASHINGTON, February 12 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan quit on Friday, February 11, over remarks he made at last month's World Economic Forum in Davos in which he accused US forces of targeting journalists in Iraq.
“After 23 years at CNN, I have 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,” Jordan said in a letter to colleagues posted on the Web site of the all-news American network.
The resignation sent shock waves through CNN because Jordan has been long admired by his peers, from executives to the rank-and-file.
Jordan joined CNN as an assistant assignment editor in 1982 and rose through the ranks to become CNN's chief news executive.
The controversy gained steam last week, with Internet bloggers posting their accounts of what transpired at the Switzerland forum, an event attended by political, economic, academic and media figures from around the world, CNN said.
The Davos organizers have said the session, like most at the forum, was off-the-record, and they have refused to release a transcript to preserve their commitment.
Al-Jazeera Targeted
Several participants at the event said Jordan told the audience that US forces had deliberately targeted journalists.
Lamis Awad, a Tunisian journalist who attended the event, said Jordan criticized the US forces for targeting reporters working for Al-Jazeera news channel in particular.
“The US administration would not allow any journalist working in a heavyweight American channel like CNN to publicly criticize its policies in Iraq,” she told the Doha-based broadcaster commenting on the resignation.
In his letter, Jordan tried to explain that some journalists were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were struck by a bomb, while others died because American occupation forces mistook them for the enemy.
“While my CNN colleagues and my friends in the US military know me well enough to know I have never stated, believed, or suspected that US military forces intended to kill people they knew to be journalists, my comments on this subject in a World Economic Forum panel discussion were not as clear as they should have been,” Jordan said.
On April 8, 2003, US forces hit with missiles Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing its correspondent Tariq Ayyoub just a few hours before rolling into the capital.
The channel officials charged the missile attack was a “deliberate” strike, recalling that Al-Jazeera office in Afghanistan had been hit in November 2001 during the US-led assault.
On April 9, 2004, the United States asked Al-Jazeera team to leave Fallujah after the channel aired footages showing the American forces violating a ceasefire in the western Baghdad city.
The US-allied interim Iraqi government has extended in September the closure of Al-Jazeera office in Iraq indefinitely.
That has drawn condemnation from media watchdogs, including Reporters without Borders and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which accused the interim government of violating press freedom.
Known for its quality programs, Al-Jazeera – nicknamed “the CNN of the Arab world” - is the most-watched channel in the Arab world.
The station’s officials plan the launch of an English satellite TV by the end of this year. It already has a sports channel and plans to also start up a documentary channel and another for children in 2005.
Launched in 1996, Al-Jazeera ranked the fifth most influential global brand in an annual survey by Brandchannel.com.
HOW'D DID I MISS THIS???
You know, they got part of this right.
AJ nearly got banned from the area; that's how much trouble they were causing. But military shooting AJ journalists?... in their propogandist dreams...
This is starting to smell even more. Wasn't it Eason Jordan who made clear years back.. that "yeah.. he knew about Saddam's murdering machines... the murder mills... and decided to not report on it and just so he could have access to Saddam?
Nah. This stinks. When all is said and done; it is really clear who's side Eason was on. Not the US. Not then, not now.
"Wasn't it Eason Jordan who made clear years back.. that "yeah.. he knew about Saddam's murdering machines... the murder mills... and decided to not report on it and just so he could have access to Saddam?"
Yep! I can't understand why this is not given the attention that it deserves within the current event...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1341595/posts?page=54#54
The WaPo's version on Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page C01
snip only:
CNN Executive Defends Silence on Known Iraqi Atrocities
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday sent a memo to his staff defending his decision to withhold information about how Saddam Hussein's regime had intimidated, tortured and killed Iraqis who had helped the cable news network over the years.
"Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin," Jordan said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The TV Column.
Eason Jordan is under fire for withholding damning information on the Iraqi regime, and Paula Zahn is said to be considering a move into prime time.
"Some critics say if I had told my Iraq horror stories sooner, I would have saved thousands of lives," he wrote in his message to staffers. "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."
Jordan has been pelted with criticism since he detailed the incidents last Thursday night on Aaron Brown's CNN program and, more thoroughly, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times the next day.
WSJ piece, Apr 03
CNN's Access of Evil
The network of record covered Saddam's repression with propaganda.
BY FRANKLIN FOER
Monday, April 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
As Baghdad fell last week, CNN announced that it too had been liberated. On the New York Times' op-ed page on Friday, Eason Jordan, the network's news chief, admitted that his organization had learned some "awful things" about the Baathist regime--murders, tortures, assassination plots--that it simply could not broadcast earlier. Reporting these stories, Mr. Jordan wrote, "would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."
Of course, Mr. Jordan may feel he deserves a pinch of credit for coming clean like this. But this admission shouldn't get him any ethical journalism trophies. 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!
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.
snipped
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003336
I'm sure you do understand why it isn't being given the proper coverage with this current event. It would underscore that he should have been gone immediately upon that disclosure.
Many of us have commented on it of late and stated the same. The media will continue to ignore. They reported it and "moved on" when it first came out and that's the way they want it.
Keep documenting it to spread the word is the best advice.
P.S. Everybody here knows that Scott Ritter's been writing for al Jazeera, I hope. If not, he is.
backhoe's archive
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/893150/posts
(darn those single sentence things, LOL)
Why isn't Scott "Chatroom" Ridder in prison?
I would keep a close eye on Arab media who will write about this meeting.
Thank you, Vn_Survivor_67-68; for serving our country, and serving us here. :)
So, in all those years, Eason did not tell the true facts about Saddam lest the "innocent" be compromised and murdered.
Al Jazeera continually spread anti-US, anti-US/Coalition progaganda on air while the US was liberating the "innocents" (Eason's word used here) from a brutal regime and its allies... AJ also 'photojournaled" US Troops activities of which terrorists were observing. And photojournaled/broadcast the atrocities of terrorist beheadings of innocents. If I follow all this correctly, applying the same logic of Eason to the logic of the Davos AJ journalist... AJ Journalists were afraid to NOT broadcast the anti-US stuff because then they'd lose their inside status with the Terrorists.
Scott Ritter needs serious exposure.
fyi
Thanks, Ernest.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.