|
Edward Wasserman. Posted on Mon, May. 05, 2003 in
The Miami Herald.
In an extraordinary confession last month, CNN's news chief wrote that
during his dozen visits to Baghad since Gulf War I, he personally learned of
savagery inflicted on ordinary Iraqis -- among them his own employees -- that
CNN did not report for fear of reprisals against innocents.
Eason Jordan titled his New York Times disclosure, ''The News We Kept to
Ourselves.'' He said that an Iraqi CNN employee was tortured so that he might
denounce Jordan as a CIA agent, and a Kuwaiti source was butchered. He recounted
a session that he had with Uday, Saddam's psychopathic son, who vowed to
assassinate King Hussein of Jordan and two fugitive sons-in-law of Saddam
Hussein whom the king was harboring. CNN reported none of that.
Jordan's column touched off a squall of controversy. Sympathizers, among
them journalists with experience in squalid police states, said that
soft-pedaling distasteful realities has long been the price of access. They
argued that the partial truths that they relate are preferable to the
informational void that otherwise we'd have.
Others wondered just how much CNN was prepared to swallow to keep the
Baghdad bureau open. It was a jewel in the network's crown since 1991, when CNN
alone among Western networks kept reporting from the ravaged capital.
Was Jordan worried about protecting the innocent -- or CNN's franchise,
however hobbled the reporting? Was CNN's silence, as The Washington Times
asserted, part of a "propaganda-for-profits deal with Saddam?''
The portrait of Hussein's Iraq that emerged from Jordan's account goes way
beyond the odd sadistic encounter. It was a land of capricious terror where
speaking to a journalist invited torture, dismemberment, death or all three, if
the subsequent report displeased somebody. Even escorts and translators might be
punished.
The issue here isn't Hussein's depravity; it's whether the accommodations
that CNN made to stay there so compromised its operations that its reporting was
fatally corrupted. Jordan's staff, he told The Washington Post, wouldn't
''report anything that jeopardized people's lives.'' What was left? Did CNN
suppress the most fundamental truths about the regime? Was that equivalent to
CBS's retaining its Berlin bureau in 1943 in exchange for silence on the
Holocaust?
Why didn't CNN simply shutter its bureau and redouble its reporting on Iraq
from unhindered vantage points in neighboring countries?
Jordan insists that CNN did fine, and he notes that its bureau was shut a
half-dozen times and that 10 correspondents were either expelled or refused
entry.
Maybe. But he also assured Poynter Institute ethicist Bob Steele that the
cases in his column were the only horror stories he held back.
That is nonsense. If those were the only atrocities that CNN's staff knew
about, they weren't looking very hard. Because CNN wouldn't air what its chief
already knew, its reporters would hardly go digging for more. Plainly, CNN
decided that it couldn't report torture safely -- safely for its staff and
sources, safely for its corporate presence.
And were omissions the only issue, or did CNN shill for Hussein? A harsh
appraisal in The New Republic last fall accused the network of fawning.
Hussein's 100 percent sweep in a manifestly bogus election was ''a vote of
defiance against the United States.'' A report on Hussein's birthday declared
him "more than a symbol, a powerful force who has survived three major
U.S.-led attacks since the Gulf War. Not just standing tall but building up.''
So what if Hussein bullied the world's most powerful news network into
subservience? Did it matter? Who knows. But perhaps, had Hussein's image been
more clearly exposed as ruthless and homicidal, his luster in the Arab streets
would have been dimmed, diplomatic pressures on him intensified -- and the
recent war averted.
For the news audience, a moreenduring question concerns the unacknowledged
compromises that journalists make, routinely and invisibly -- with sources,
publicists, apparatchiks, whose connivance is indispensable to the news process,
and whose approval has indisputably more impact than the public's.
To what degree are you, as reader or viewer, the person to whom the news is
truly intended -- or are you eavesdropping on another transaction? When does
news become currency, with the news organization purchasing what it needs with
generous and judicious reporting? The notion of programming as payment isn't
new. Marshall McLuhan suggested that TV shows are the payoff viewers get for
watching advertisements.
For a TV journalist, the public is vague and amorphous: Viewers won't
scrutinize every reference to Hussein to determine if it's respectful. But
censors will. Their jobs -- and perhaps their lives -- depend on it. So when do
they become the primary audience for which the message is crafted?
Unfortunately, the conditions under which CNN operated in Iraq aren't so
different, in their essentials, from those that many reporters face. So they
tailor their reporting to sustain their access to the sources they need.
The public is wedded to the absurd belief that journalists pillage their
sources. Reporters are far more likely to coddle, flatter and pander to them.
Even when they're monsters.
Edward Wasserman is a writer and consultant in Miami.
edward_wasserman@hotmail.com | 
