CNN?s slogan is ?The Most Trusted Name in News.? However, after last week?s opinion piece in newspaper, many question whether this is still the case.
The op-ed written by Eason Jordan, CNN?s chief news executive, admits that over the last 12 years CNN held back certain stories because reporting them would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis.
Although critics acknowledge the network was in a tough position, that doesn?t excuse what they call irresponsible journalism. Franklin Foer, associate editor at magazine, wrote an article last October called ?How Saddam Manipulates the U.S. Media.?
In his article, Mr. Foer outlined how the Iraqis were ?masters of the Orwellian pantomime that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media.? Nobody covered the Iraqi propaganda better, says Mr. Foer, than CNN in Baghdad.
?When I asked CNN about its coverage of Iraq last October, they told me that they were giving their viewers a full picture of what was going on within Iraq. And I got no sense from talking to Eason Jordan that there were any stories that they were omitting for any reason whatsoever,? Mr. Foer says. ?He actually went so far as to challenge me to come up with big things that CNN was omitting from their coverage. And of course, if I?d had his op-ed at hand, I would have been able to read him back a rather long list of stories that CNN was sitting on.?
?I think that it was a serious breach of journalism, and more importantly, it was symptomatic of the approach to journalism that CNN takes when dealing with dictatorships like the Baathist one in Iraq,? Mr. Foer says. ?I think that there?s an astonishing willingness for CNN and for other Western news organizations to make certain journalistic sacrifices in order to obtain access in these sorts of regimes.?
In response, Mr. Jordan says despite these omissions, CNN?s coverage of the Iraqi regime over the past 12 years has been accurate.
?The critics are not looking at the evidence which is clear and readily available as far as CNN reporting for many years, and quite often, on the brutality of the regime, on the human rights record of the regime,? he says. ?CNN had the most contentious relationship of any news organization in the world when it came to Iraq. Iraqi officials hated CNN. They accused me of being a CIA Station Chief for Baghdad. The expelled our correspondents. They banned more than a dozen of our correspondents, and they threatened to assassinate our staff. I don?t know how that would suggest that somehow CNN was kow-towing, or cowering to the Baghdad regime.?
Mr. Jordan goes on to note that CNN reported on Iraq in the face of unrelenting pressure from the regime.
?We reported from Northern Iraq under threat of assassination. An Iraqi official threatened to kill our journalists if they went to the North. We defied the threat. We went anyway. We did it at the risk of losing our access in Baghdad. We did it at the risk of the lives of our journalists in Northern Iraq, but we did it anyway because we were not going to cower in the face of those threats,? Mr. Jordan says.
Mr. Foer and other critics say Eason Jordan was right to worry about the safety of his reporters and staff. However, Mr. Foer says there was an alternative.
?He does have a point in that by operating within Iraq, CNN was putting itself in a horrible position where their employees were threatened with their lives,? he says. ?And to me, when you?re in a situation like that where you can?t speak the truth because you?re afraid of the physical consequences of it, it seems to me that?s a good reason to pick up your stakes and move your tent somewhere else where you can report more honestly.?
Was the reporting out of Baghdad accurate? Jonathan Last, online editor at magazine, while sympathetic to the very difficult situation that CNN found itself in, says he?s not sure the reporting inside Iraq was worth the moral and ethical cost.
?This is a case where it looks to me as if CNN?s good reporting on Iraq - almost none of it came from inside of Iraq. When they covered Saddam Hussein?s election, CNN reported that ?his 100% victory was a message of defiance to the U.S. president George Bush.? I don't know how helpful that is as reporting and whether or not that was worth the cost,? he says.