The News CNN Suppressed

Accuracy In Media ^ | 04/15/03 | Reed Irvine

[walford]

In an op-ed article in the New York Times on April 11, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, said he had been to Baghdad many times to get the government to keep CNN's bureau open. He said, "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."

Here is one of the stories CNN suppressed. Jordan said, "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." Jordan said that if CNN reported this the cameraman would have been killed and his family and co-workers would have been endangered.

His admission that stories like these were suppressed has raised questions about the credibility of CNN.

[walford]

There is good reason that CNN has lost ratings while others have seen their viewership increase lately.

[observer5]

By suppressing news about brutality against their own CNN people, CNN encouraged brutality of the Saddam regime, by confirming it works.

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

Tell CNN what you think here: cnn@cnn.com