CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, bared his soul on Friday in a New York Times column, exposing to the world the horrors he had encountered in his nearly 15 years of reporting on Iraq.
CNN did not print or speak these sentiments when they occurred, because it would have lost its reporting privileges in Iraq if it had. Jordan's every pithy word seemed to beg for sympathy and pity.
Jordan craves for the reader to feel as if he is another victim of a cruel regime. Though, unlike the stories he writes of where men and women are beaten to death, his plight is still wretched because he "felt awful having these stories bottled up inside."
Well, Mr. Jordan, I feel no sympathy for you. Mine is spent on those who truly deserve it, and what little is left is solely given to the American people you deceived for so long.
Jordan offered several examples of the horrors of Saddam's regime. A woman, after speaking to CNN, was tortured for two months until she was finally bludgeoned and chopped into pieces to be hand-delivered to her family.
When Uday Hussein told Jordan of his plans to assassinate his two brothers-in-law, Jordan knew their time was short, but he chose not to report it, again. He did feel it was his "moral obligation to warn" the monarch of Jordan, the host country of the two Hussein relatives.
When King Hussein "dismissed the threat as a madman's rant," Eason Jordan gave up. Perhaps if CNN had been doing its job all along, King Hussein would have given the threats validity and the two relatives wouldn't have been lured back to Iraq and summarily executed.
Though Jordan now feels as if he should be lauded for his confession, the fact is that he has been profiting off of these very abhorrent crimes. By allowing them to continue unreported, Jordan was given many privileges within Iraq.
As Franklin Foer recently pointed out in his Wall Street Journal column, CNN has long denied any doctoring of their reports. Jordan even told Foer that, "his network gave 'a full picture of the regime.'"
Foer shows further how CNN's bottom line of getting a story, any story, out of Iraq amounted to nothing less then succumbing to blackmail from a dictatorship that recognized news lust.
Since news reporters were banned from the country for acts as simple as not referring to Saddam as President Saddam Hussein, CNN must have done a great job of abiding by all "the rules."
In fact, CNN reporter Jane Arraf was nothing short of a Saddam public relations agent. As Foer reports, on the tenth anniversary of the gulf war, Arraf had this to say of Saddam:
"At 63, [Saddam] mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf War, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding." That sounds like unbiased reporting to me!
The refrain in Jordan's column is that he couldn't speak for fear of the lives of his reporters and his Iraqi employees. I would have suggested a healthier reaction to that fear: leave.
Instead of continuing to place his reporters in harm's way while perpetuating a horrific regime, CNN should have walked out of Iraq and exposed to the American people what Saddam really was. Instead, CNN served to prop Hussein up with its crutch of legitimacy.
Instead, their biased coverage and rah-rah anti-war blathering only hindered the end of those acts Jordan is now so relieved to relay.
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Shanna Bowman is an industrial engineering senior. Reach her at snb@asu.edu.
