CNN Exec’s Times Article Revealing of Media Attitudes
May 1, 2003
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
Discussions of media editorial policies have been frequent in this column over the years for two reasons. The first is my own professional interest in how the media handles news and commentary in general and about firearms and firearms owners in particular. The second is that gunowners have become convinced—with good reason—that the media is largely committed to promoting the anti-gun agenda.
There have been attempts over more than 25 years even in the general media itself to treat what is considered bias against guns and gunowners. I can recall one such article in Esquire magazine that dates back to the early 1980s. In it, a prominent writer, whose very pro-gun, pro-self-defense article was published by the magazine, noted that editors acted as though some public debate had been held at some distant time in which it was universally decided that there was no validity to the pro-gun arguments. In the rest of the article, he demonstrated why anyone who held that view was totally wrong.
But this bias debate about guns continues, even though most of the great legal minds of recent years have written and published learned papers supporting the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment. In fact, the media’s most frequent response to such constitutional scholarship is to spike any news about them. Indeed, in some newspapers, one never sees any reviews or mention of books dealing with the research of people like John Lott, Gary Kleck and Joyce Malcolm.
What Other Untruths?
The frequent discussions of gunowners about media bias against guns often come to the point where a key question is asked:
“If they are lying about guns, or getting gun facts wrong, what else are they lying about.”
Well, many of us have known of incidents where news was not reported, or was distorted. But now comes an unusual revelation from Eason Jordan, the head of Cable News Network’s (CNN) news department.
Entitled “The News We Kept to Ourselves,” it was published Apr. 11 in The New York Times.
Here is the entire text of Jordan’s piece as it was printed:
“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.
“For example, in the mid-1990s one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government’s ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency’s Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
“Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
Dangers
“We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
“Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan’s monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman’s rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
“I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
“Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would suffer the severest possible consequences. CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed CIA and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
“Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for ‘crimes,’ one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.
“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.”
Public Response
Following publication of Jordan’s article, The Times was deluged with letters to its editor, most of them, judging from the sampling I have seen, very uncomplimentary to Jordan and CNN.
Then, on Apr. 16, Jordan appeared on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to explain further that his purpose in writing the article was to encourage more revelations of Hussein’s atrocities now that it is safe for the individuals—and apparently CNN and its reporters—to tell such tales.
Bear in mind that Jordan is the kind of high-level network news guy who decides what is and what is not news. He makes the decisions about what stories reporters will cover, what taped footage will be shown, and how the cable network will present that story. He is the kind of guy who is constantly sending messages to the on-air reporters through the earphones attached to every talking head, instructing them what to ask, when and how.
His revelations about CNN policies and his own approach to such media ethics questions are quite revealing. It should provide the public—and especially gunowners and activists—a better understanding about how the media really ticks. Return to Archive Index
