Ted Kavanau
Wednesday, April 16, 2003

It came as no surprise to me that, for more than a decade, CNN was not telling the truth it knew about the Saddam Hussein regime.

There have been letters to Shoptalk and newspaper commentaries, (e.g., "Craven News Network" (NY Post), "CNN"s Access of Evil" (Wall St. Journal), condemning CNN news chief Eason Jordan for his admissions in a New York Times op-ed piece that CNN had learned some "awful things" ('torture, murder, assassination plots') that could not be reported, Jordan claimed, because doing so would jeopardize the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on his Baghdad staff.

In spite of that, Jordan says he made 13 trips to Baghdad to "lobby to keep the CNN Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders."

I was surprised by Jordan's public admissions but not by much else.

Until 1987 I had been a high level news executive for CNN and I knew most of the top people running the organization. On January 19, 1991, following the U.S. attack on Baghdad that began the Gulf War, I sent a four-page, single-spaced fax to each of three then current top CNN news executives, warning them of how they were going to be used by Saddam and even cited one of their own journalists admitting in 1991 that they were not reporting the whole truth about the regime.

Here are just a few quotes from that four-page 1991 fax:

".... I am writing this letter out of deep concern as an American and as one of the founders of the network, whose facilities I think are being grossly misused."

... "I was fascinated when Bernard Shaw, whose personal courage and journalistic ability I highly respect, said upon his return from Baghdad that he would not report certain things because it might (paraphrasing here) antagonize the Iraqis if their security was endangered and thus create a risk to CNN staff still in Baghdad. I would like to know how you square your journalistic responsibilities with that."

... "Why do you think Saddam Hussein allows CNN and other reporters into Baghdad unless he thought it was useful to him."

... "Are you bending over backward to be 'balanced' so that you will be a trustworthy and equitable world network, welcome in the offices of democrats and dictators all over the globe?"

Indeed, as one critic in the newspapers pointed out, Jordan does not "deserve applause" for his admissions. CNN, he writes, still works under "media guidelines" in dictatorships like Cuba, Burma and Syria.

When will CNN ever learn?

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Castro/Cuba
Media Bias
Middle East
Saddam Hussein/Iraq

Editor's note:
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