CNN Admits Honest Reporting Was Impossible, So Why Go To Baghdad?

Media Research Center ^ | Friday, April 11, 2003 | Katie Wright

[Remedy]

Will Other Networks Now Reveal The Saddam Secrets They Kept?

Americans debated President Bush’s Iraq policies for months, and one of the key questions was the nature of Saddam’s regime — was the dictator pragmatic enough to genuinely cooperate with U.N. inspectors, or was his regime so thoroughly evil that it could not be reformed, disarmed or contained? It turns out news organizations reporting from Baghdad had lots of information about the true nature of Saddam’s regime, but concealed it from viewers.

Thursday night on CNN’s NewsNight, and in an op-ed, "The News We Kept to Ourselves," in Friday’s New York Times, the executive in charge of CNN’s worldwide news-gathering operations, Eason Jordan, revealed Saddam’s thugs harassed his staff, imprisoned Iraqi citizens who worked for CNN, and hatched a plot to murder his reporters working in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

"The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services," he disclosed. "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."

"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," Jordan wrote. He felt CNN could not reveal any of their information without putting lives at risk: "An aide to Uday [Hussein, Saddam’s son] once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliars and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting the boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us."

"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," Jordan concluded. "At last, these stories can be told freely."

In the October 28, 2002 New Republic, Franklin Foer documented how foreign journalists in Baghdad were afraid of reporting anything that would upset Saddam and get them kicked out of Iraq. Jordan now admits that CNN kept many of Saddam’s secrets; have other networks also censored their own tales of Saddam’s evil? If accurate reporting from Iraq was impossible, why was access to this dictatorship so important in the first place? And what truths about the thugs who run other totalitarian states — like North Korea, Cuba and Syria — are fearful and/or access-hungry reporters hiding from the American public?

[Remedy]

Will Other Networks Now Reveal The Saddam Secrets They Kept?

• The Atlantic | May 2002 | Tales of the Tyrant | Bowden He has become a student of one of the most tyrannical leaders in history: Joseph Stalin.
  

• Goldberg Predicts Collapse of Liberal Media Speaking at special NewsMax NewsMaker Forum on Thursday, Goldberg said that millions of Americans are voting with their feet and getting their news from alternative media including Fox News Channel, talk radio and Web sites such as NewsMax.com.

• Iraqis pour out tales of Saddam's torture chambers I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands," said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41.

• Where Are the Human Rights Groups? Only evil America was capable of committing atrocities.
  

• Media Watch -- 04/01/1989 -- Page One: Reporters First, Americans ... In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

[Remedy]

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[TheLion]

Talk about being "In Bed with the Enemy"!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Since CNN's mission didn't include honest reporting, they saw no contradiction in being in Iraq.

[sinclair]

On the rear bumper of my car is a bumper sticker. It is the only bumper sticker I have ever put on any vehicle I have ever owned. It reads simply: CNNLIES.

[caisson71]

IMHO, what CNN has done and is STILL doing is contemptible and treasonous. They give comfort to the enemy, promote their propaganda, give them access to information otherwise unavailable to them and put Americans at risk. What's more, they do this for MONEY. CNN betrays the constitutional guarantees which give them via right of free press by those very people they endanger. I hope their days are numbered and maybe some of them should be tried for treason.

[airborne]

So dishonest reporting was what was left, and they were OK with that. I'm not surprised.

[Remedy]

CNN ping