Now they tell us
This piece by CNN news chief executive Eason Jordan about how CNN had no choice but to act as little more than a propaganda arm of the Saddam regime while the monster was in power is appalling on many levels.
Reporting news in a torture regime can be tricky. If you don't follow the rules dictated by the regime, someone is going to wind up getting tortured. And in order to make sure that someone isn't you, you have to make some, er, compromises.
I'm most struck by the weird moral calculus reflected in these anecdotes: one factor in deciding whether to run a story appears to have been a sober consideration of who would be murdered if the story ran, versus who might be murdered if the story did not run. Regardless of the "editorial" decision: someone was going to get murdered in either case.
Are you as unimpressed as I am with the argument that the noble goal of "keeping the Baghdad bureau open" justified any amount of whitewashing and suppressing of stories? If they're not reporting what's going on, what good are they? And it's not just a case of being useless. If they're only reporting and spinning stories in a way that a repressive police state can feel good about, they're complicit.
It's nice that Jordan felt bad about it while he was doing it and all. But perhaps if some of these stories had been reported, public opinion might have supported more serious intervention in Iraq at an earlier stage, more scrutiny of the execrable affronts to human rights and dignity, a quicker end to such appalling brutality and suffering.
I'm sure he's right that more stories like this will come out. Even at this early stage, it doesn't make CNN look good. Once again, I'm going to have to quote my buddy Matt Welch:
This is appalling, though no surprise. The embarrassing Peter Arnett interview on Iraq TV was just a brief public glimpse on what has been a nasty little private "secret" for years -- that "news bureaus" in Baghdad and other totalitarian capitals (Havana, to name one) are actually propaganda huts, churning out what CNN producers call "sanctions coverage" (pieces on the awful humanitarian toll of international economic sanctions), while refusing to report the awful truth. It is possible, though intensely difficult, to do honest journalism in such circumstances. But with this column, I think we have the final proof that CNN will not be the news organization to rise to that challenge. Shame.