In today’s New York Times (free, but registration required) there’s an Op-Ed by CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan entitled “The News We Kept to Ourselves”. In it Jordan says that there’s a whole slew of Iraqi horrors that CNN never reported because doing so would’ve “jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.” He relates a story of how Uday Hussein told him that he was going to kill his two brothers-in-law who defected and King Hussein of Jordan. CNN’s Jordan didn’t want to report this as news because “he was sure” that the translator, who was the only other person in the room at the time this was revealed, would be killed. As a result the two brothers-in-law were lured into a trap and assasinated.
The debate is this- did CNN act appropriately? In order to be in a position to report the news, they couldn’t report the news- By not reporting certain stories critical of the Iraqi government, CNN was able to maintain a presence in Iraq and keep a working relationship with Saddam’s gov’t. But they weren’t performing their job as reporters and may have gotten others killed in order to maintain this relationship. Is this moral?
This is a great question. It’s too tough for me. All I can say is, thank goodness George Bush was President and he acted on the basis of the Ba’ath regime’s true nature. OTOH how many thousands were killed by Saddam while Bush Sr. and Clinton failed to act.
No. Not unless they were up front all these years and told us that their stories were influenced by Iraqi government policy, which they did not do.
Ironically, these journalists would have been up in arms if the American government had censored them. I guess it’s okay if tinpot dictators do it.
If they couldn’t do their jobs without undue influence, CNN reporters should have left and told their viewers that they couldn’t report accurately from Iraq.
How am I to trust any story CNN files now from places like North Korea, Cuba or Zimbabwe?
This is a real dilemma. I was horrified when I read the story.
They chose to remain quiet in order to stay there & report other things. This does give them a credibility problem now. However, if they had not done so, it would have jeopardized the safety, possibly the lives, of the local people in their Baghdad office. If Eason Jordan had reported then what he’s reporting now, would it have made a difference? Would he have been believed? Even now, if just one network reports something, people may say they are less than 100% truthful because “if that really happened someone else would have reported it, too.”
It does make me question what I hear from CNN (and to be fair, pretty much any news outlet in a particularly sticky locale). When you take this article and combine it with this quote from Jordan:
Kinda makes a person wonder if they pushed stories aside simply for the cachet of being known as the station with Iraqi access.
At least there is a late admission, now that the exigency has passed. Continuing to lie would be much worse. Clearly, as journalists, they did the wrong thing. Obviously, a lot more than journalism was in play.
I always assumed that the media was soft-peddling people like Saddam and Castro, given the “exclusive” interviews with the aforementioned scumbags. I wonder what Dan Rather could tell us? [sub]at Gitmo :D[/sub]
A couple of things I find slightly odd about this story are a) why on earth would Uday announce to a reporter of the foreign press that he was going to carry out a political assassination on foreign soil; b) Would the brothers-in-law really have had no idea at all that someone might come after them unless CNN had reported it?
Anyway, some lives apparently were saved through silence, others apparently lost. Can one state which lives were more important?
It’s hard to judge this one after the fact, but I’m willing to believe (subject to clarification of the above points) that Jordan was sure that Iraqi CNN staff would have been tortured and killed if he had reported certain stories. OTOH, I think a more responsible network would have pulled its foreign staff and shut its bureau in protest if its local staffers were being regularly abducted and tortured.
And if anyone really is shocked that CNN managment may omit or soft-pedal certain stories to serve its own ends, well…
I think it is a shame that he knew that Iraqi’s were being tortured and worse, and did not bring it to the attention of the world. He wanted to save the lives he knew, instead of attempt to expose the truth to save the lives of countless others he did not know.
Why risk the safety of Iraqi and foreign journalists and crews to report from Baghdad, if you are not going to report what you find because it may endanger the safety of Iraqi and foreign jornalists and crews?
Here’s Jordan’s comments about how CNN “has a spine” when it comes to Iraq.
I might buy his argument about saving translators and other CNN affiliated Iraqis if at any point CNN or Jordan took steps to ensure their safety in the future. It looks more likely that CNN continued to put people’s lives in danger just to be able to say that they had a presence in Iraq, rather than to report the news. I’m not sure there will be another side to this debate.
I have to go along with El_Kabong on this. What kind of connection did CNN have with Saddam and his sons that they thought they could confide this to them in the first place?
And why didn’t CNN air this “confession” on their own network?
“CNN’s Jordan didn’t want to report this as news because “he was sure” that the translator, who was the only other person in the room at the time this was revealed, would be killed.”
I am not sure I understand this. If Uday freely told the CNN reporter why would he kill the translator?
In general I don’t think it is wrong to not report a story if doing so will endanger innocent lives. That is the price of working in an authoritarian country; you aren’t operating under the same rules as a democracy. But it’s possible to explain to viewers in general terms that they aren’t getting the whole picture.
Only thing I can think of is to get rid of anyone who could corroborate the story if CNN ran it. But it still doesn’t explain why he’d blab it to Jordan in the first place.
Yeah, stick me in the “they should’ve at least told us that they were routinely forced to withhold stories” camp. Ideally, they would’ve pulled their reporters out of there in protest, and mentioned in general terms the atrocities that were going on. They way they (or at least Jordan) handled it, though, seriously affects my opinion of CNN, which was not that high to begin with.
Jeff
IMO, they should have left the country as quietly and as safely as possible, and then told everything they knew. I think the bozos stayed in Baghdad for one reason: $$$$$$. I think it sucks, and I think CNN’s credibility is 0.