[(Continued from p.11)]
different take on CNN's behavior these past twelve years. Why did CNN remain in Baghdad if the price was covering up what its executives knew to be the truth about the regime? The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto reminds us that Franklin Foer of the New Republic had asked Jordan last October why CNN was so determined to maintain its presence in Baghdad and had been given two reasons -- it was newsworthy and it was expected that if anyone was in Baghdad, it would be CNN. In other words access was an end in itself, never mind the price, and as Foer observed, reinforced the truth of the old journalistic aphorism "access is a curse."On Fox News, media commentator Eric Burns made an important observation. While Jordan excuses the prettified portrait its on-scene reporters painted of the monstrous regime by invoking an altruistic motivation -- saving the lives of Iraqis who worked for the network -- CNN did not employ alternative ways of showing what the regime was like which would not have threatened its local staff. As Burns points out, CNN could have brought in a variety of experts on Saddam to act as a counterweight to its self-censoring reporters -- there have been many books describing the real Saddam, including books by defectors who managed to escape to the West. Nor did CNN have to provide the smarmy coverage it did of Saddam's birthday celebrations or his "election" by a supposedly uniformly enthusiastic public. Even during the war, CNN's stations abroad shamelessly catered to anti-American sentiment and were described as a second Al Jazeera (in the U.S., with Fox breathing down its neck, CNN at least avoided that).
It is important to recognize that media sycophancy to brutal regimes, with the resulting distortion of coverage and misleading of the public, is not confined to CNN. Twenty years ago, in Lebanon, journalist Kenneth Timerman broke the silence about the muzzling of journalists by the PLO, which kidnapped, brutalized and threatened with death journalists who failed to toe its propaganda line. Today intimidation of journalists is the rule in the land controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Journalists leave or lie -- the ones with "access" are the liars.
As Andrea Levin of the media watchdog CAMERA has pointed out, if news organizations made it a policy to publicize the threats, and/or pull reporters, rather than submit to self-censorship for "access," they would help to make the practice of intimidation ineffective.
British cabinet minister John Reid accused the BBC of acting like a "friend of Baghdad." The London Observer (March 30) reported that Prime Minister Blair and his government, while reluctant to make official complaints, were angered by the BBC's broadcasters acting as if there was a "moral equivalence" between America and Britain and Saddam Hussein's regime. Said one senior figure at Number 10: "You cannot deal with the two sides as if they are the same."
No one at Number 10 has ever commented -- or even noticed, one suspects -- that BBC coverage of Is- rael is even worse. No moral equivalence there. Suicide bombers are the white hats, the Israelis the black hats. Period.
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Outpost - 12 - May 2003