vigilant TV

The has been widely reported elsewhere, but deserves a mention: CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan lists some of the atrocities committed by the Iraqi government over the past decade or so that news services were unable to report, lest they endanger sources and face expulsion from the country.

For example, in the mid-1990’s 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.

[...]

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 C.I.A. 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.

– NY Times, The News We Kept to Ourselves.

James Glassman says the result was that western media organizations became mere propaganda outlets for the Iraqi regime, and suggests they could have done better.

Clearly, there were ways to protect the identities of individual victims of the regime’s brutality. And, clearly, by reporting the stories, CNN might finally have aroused the outrage of the world, which in turn would have brought Saddam’s end closer – either through united, global pressure or through earlier military action.

It appears there is another, more troubling, reason Jordan decided not to report these hideous crimes until the regime was safely out of the way: CNN didn’t want to lose its on-the-ground access to a big story.

[...]

“Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors,” [Franklin Foer] wrote, “the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime – the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories – that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It’s not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq.”

– TCS, Sins of Omission.

Glassman certainly correct about the propaganda, but it’s not at all clear that there was any alternative available to CNN: it’s likely that none of the choices they were able to make would have improved the quality of information they could report.