Eason Jordan, executive news director of CNN, writes of stories about Iraq that CNN intentionally quashed in order to protect his reporters and their Iraqi employees.
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.
The stories include tales of torture, dismemberment, assassinations planned (and executed) and so forth.
At what point, one has to wonder, does an obligation to the truth outweigh the competitive advantage of having a Baghdad bureau? While Mr Jordan did, ultimately warn King Hussein about a threat Uday Hussein had made to him about assassinating the monarch, he evidently didn’t pass on the same warning to two of Uday’s similarly-threatened brothers-in-law, who were then lured back into Iraq and killed.
How much blood on the hands is it worth in order to “be there” with other news stories?
(via InstaPundit)
Volokh notes that last fall, Jordan was vehemently denying that CNN was reporting anything but the truth and the whole truth, and that it was clearly not suppressing news to curry favor with the Baghdad regime.
I mean 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; but we do think that some light is better than no light whatsoever.
What was the motive behind bottling up the stories? If it were to ensure that there would be further news reports, then I would agree with you at it being horrid. If the intention were as written “…protect his reporters and their Iraqi employees” I don’t think I would find fault with his concern of the people actually in country and under Saddam law.
If we take Jordan at his (earlier) word, that if he couldn’t report accurately and fairly, he wouldn’t want to be there, then the answer would have been for CNN to pull out of Baghdad. That would safeguard his reporters, at the very least, and let him not learn any new horror tales that couldn’t be repeated.
Being put in a compromising moral/ethical position is only defensible if you act to not be in such a position in the future.
Some more rather biting criticism of CNN in all of this can be found here, and here.
The really moral thing to do, obviously, would have been to pull out of Iraq years ago, instead of allowing Iraqis on CNN’s payroll to be tortured so that they could maintain the status symbol of “access” to the regime. This is nothing more than an attempt to preempt the likely damage to CNN’s reputation caused by the (accurate) perception that they have been complicit in Hussein’s enslavement of the Iraqi people since at least 1991.
Or as Rand Simberg puts it:
Now that we know how the game is played, please tell us why your reporting from Damascus, or Gaza, or the West Bank (as just three examples) should be given any credibility whatsoever. How much of Arafat and Assad’s thuggish behavior have you been covering up? And if you now propose to tell us, why should we believe you?
And not to beat a dead horse, but it also raises even further really serious questions about Peter Arnett’s comments on Iraqi TV to his Iraqi hosts:
Well, I’d like to say from the beginning that the 12 years I’ve been coming here, I’ve met unfailing courtesy and cooperation. Courtesy from your people, and cooperation from the Ministry of Information, which has allowed me and many other reporters to cover 12 whole years since the Gulf War with a degree of freedom which we appreciate. And that is continuing today.
It would be amazing if Arnett, with all his years in Baghdad (including working for CNN until 1999), hadn’t encountered the same sorts of things that Jordan describes, which makes his brown-nosing all the more ghastly.