The news CNN kept secret until Saddam ousted

What is with the Fox commentary? "Why reveal this now..." Because Saddam is no longer in power and therefore can't, in fact, kill those people! "Doesn't CNN have a journalistic obligation to report these kind of details, or to make their reporters aware of them? You can bet if CNN made discoveries about, say, a conservative administration, they would share them." Wha...? And that would put people at significant risk of death and torture? Does Fox know something about the current administration they aren't telling?

This is the quandry no? If the story had been revealed 12 years ago CNNs "sources" may have very well been killed - Jordan obvioulsy had good reason to believe they would have been.

But.. How many people have been killed over the last 12 years because no one acted? How many others were allowed to be tortured in the mean time? Would the world have stepped in sooner had stories such as this been reported?

The quandry highlighted by this story is a classic one. Should the lives of a few people be placed at risk for a possible greater benefit of the lives of many? And what is the responisbility of a free press in that quandry?

I wasn't surprised by this stuff -- appalled, to be sure, but was it such a surprise to anyone? I don't think it's ever really been on the table that Saddam was really, really, REALLY bad -- just how to best deal with it.

By the way, I haven't decided about what I think about CNN's actions. But what leapt out at me were the Fox quotes.

The rest of the "Why reveal this now?" quote, for exmaple:

I'd say the "Why reveal this now?" question is a good one though
I'm sure FOX is playing this to the hilt since CNN is a competitor.

Yeah. There was another op-ed just below that one in the NYT from an Iraqi exile writing under his real name for the first time since he left, since he hadn't wanted to endanger the family members still in Iraq. I'm sure he was just trying to cash in, too.

Anyone who thinks there isn't information manipulation -- and most notably by Fox -- needs a brain transplant! Much of this will come back to haunt us. A society which rejects naked, unvarnished information reported out as soon as possible rather than "timed for distribution" is a society which doesn't have a free press, isn't smart, and is sliding headfirst, eagerly, down the tubes. I'm sympathetic with CNN's wish to protect its reporters and their families. Jordan probably did the right thing(s), but did anyone else find his "bottled-up" story awfully self-serving?

Fox, evidently.

I don't have enough info yet -- I can see it going either way.

Here's the Op-Ed piece I was referring to, btw.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11HUSS.html

Yup, Sozobe, I saw that -- and Krugman's piece which is important too. Someone who covers this territory well is Chris Hedges, whose book on being a war correspondent came out last September. There's been a lot of talk about it. For those unfamiliar with it, here's a quick and easy intro: http://query.nytimes.com/search/full-page?res=9B06E6D61F3DF931A15753C1A9649C8B63

CNN its Iraq atrocities silence, unrelated to access
CNN says its silence on Iraq atrocities had nothing to do with maintaining access

Monday, April 14, 2003
San Francisco Chronicle
(04-14) 16:09 PDT NEW YORK (AP) --

A top CNN executive kept quiet about some atrocities in Iraq not because the network wanted to protect access but because it worried about putting lives in danger, CNN said Monday.

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, revealed the incidents in an op-ed piece in The New York Times Friday headlined "The News We Kept to Ourselves."

He said that in the mid-1990s, an Iraqi cameraman working for CNN was tortured because the government believed Jordan worked for the CIA. Reporting the story "would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk," Jordan wrote.

CNN also learned from Kurds that a planned attack on network employees by Saddam Hussein's forces in Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq was thwarted a few months ago, he said.

Jordan was subsequently criticized by at least two columnists for soft-pedaling news on Iraq to maintain CNN's access to the country by its reporters.

Franklin Foer, an associate editor of New Republic magazine, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that he was suspicious of Jordan's "outbreak of honesty."

But Foer wrote the he didn't see it as honesty. "If it were, Mr. Jordan wouldn't be portraying CNN as Saddam's victim. He'd be apologizing for its cooperation with Iraq's erstwhile information ministry -- and admitting that CNN policy hinders truthful coverage of dictatorships."

The New York Post, owned by the same company that owns CNN competitor Fox News Channel, headlined Eric Fettmann's column, "Craven News Network."

CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson noted that CNN reporters have frequently been kicked out of Baghdad by angry authorities, most recently a few days after the start of the war.

"The decision not to report these particular events had nothing to do with access, and everything to do with keeping people from being killed as a result of our reporting," she said.

Reading all of this just made me cry. In the UK I feel I've been truly sheltered from horrific detail and I feel quite ashamed for it. I thank you for bringing this to my attention, and we can only hope and pray that these atrocities can soon stop - forever.

Fishness
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