CNN - what's happened to it?

UPDATED

In an appalling op-ed piece in the New York Times, "The News We Kept to Ourselves," CNN's chief news executive says: "Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

CNN should have left the country. It was not worth keeping a bureau open if the only way to do so was to make so many ethical and moral compromises.

Lance Knobel wonders what compromises CNN is making elsewhere.

Kevin Sites got it. His employer did not.

Sites, a CNN correspondent reporting from Iraq, created a weblog. Day by day, as the second Gulf War since 1990 approached, he posted stories and commentary. He told readers what it was like to be a correspondent in an unfriendly place. Day by day his audience grew.

CNN had been the journalistic pathbreaker in the 1991 Gulf War. Now, showing how quickly a company can go from leadership to stodgy, its news officials did the stupid thing when they became aware of the Sites weblog. They told him to shut it down.

CNN's cluelessness was all the more misguided given its heavy push onto the World Wide Web. But it was not as surprising as you might expect. CNN had become old media, in a world where the rules, techniques and just about everything else are changing so quickly it's hard to keep up.