Will CNN Go The Way of Saddam?

April 16, 2003

The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime might very well mean the destruction of the world’s first 24-hour news service, CNN.   As it turns out – and many suspected – CNN and Saddam were joined at the hip.   CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s startling admission in the New York Times that CNN execs were well aware of Saddam’s atrocities but kept them hush-hush in order to maintain a presence in Baghdad goes beyond journalistic integrity.   It ventures into the territory of propagandizing for the enemy.

In January of 1991, Ted Kavanau, the creator of CNN Headline News, warned his colleagues in a four-page memo that they were being used by the Iraqi regime.   He notes that Bernard Shaw, upon his return home after the Gulf War, stated that he refrained from reporting some important facts because it might antagonize the Iraqis.  

Peter Arnett, the former CNN correspondent and now discredited mouthpiece for the Iraqi Minister of Disinformation who claimed the battle plan had been scrapped, prided himself in his exclusive access to that brutal regime.   That access came with a price and now no self-respecting news outlet in the world will get within 10 miles of Peter the Puppet.

 

Probably the most incredible and telling sign of CNN’s complicity came when Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq's U.N. ambassador, left New York for Syria after a good fanny-whipping by coalition forces.   Before slinking off to Damascus, he greeted the throng of reporters with an “I was with you all along” grin on his face.   After a brief statement, he began walking to his car.   Spotting the CNN reporter, he walked back and kissed him on the check, thanking him for being his friend.   After another few steps toward the car, he abruptly turned around and returned to the reporter, hugging and kissing him again, thanking him profusely.   How symbolic that scene was.

If not armed with the specifics, the American public finally has CNN’s number.   Fox News Channel continues to drum CNN in the ratings and the war only magnified CNN’s woes.   And no wonder.   I flipped back and forth between the two during the coverage and wondered if they were both covering the same war.   As Fox News trumpeted the taking of Baghdad and the toppling of Saddam’s statue, CNN was taking a far less celebratory tone.   They covered the statue story but continually broke away to cover a small skirmish between Americans and what was left of the Iraqi Republican Guard warning that many days, if not weeks, of hard fighting lay ahead.   Commenting on the thousands of Arabs who took to the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, Judy Woodruff referred to them as “several hundred.”

Don’t get me wrong.   I don’t expect any network to be a propaganda tool for our government, either.   What I do expect is factual reporting.   The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.   That’s all I ask.   Opinions are fine but they don’t belong in journalistic pieces designed to give me the facts.   The outcome of this war was never in question and any reporting that made it look otherwise was obviously laced with opinion and someone’s agenda.

CNN has found itself in a bit of a quandary.   Conventional wisdom says that in times of big news, they do better.   Certainly they increased their audience share with this war, too.   The problem was, Fox News got the lion’s share of those new viewers.   As we begin to return to normal, CNN will drop back to ordinary numbers but Fox News is now even stronger.   Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime has gone the way of the dinosaur, CNN may not be far behind.