CNN will limp away from the field

The 1991 Gulf War was a triumph for CNN.

The network emerged from the war not simply as the world’s network of record but also as the one that proved the indispensability of 24-hour television news at moments of crisis. CNN’s performance in that conflict made the case for cable news’ value so convincingly that two domestic competitors and a host of foreign imitators since have entered the field.

But as the war in Iraq winds down, CNN leaves the field with its reputation battered.

Despite the professional -- sometimes distinguished -- work of its journalists, a stunning admission by the network’s top news executive has raised profound questions about the values that govern the core of CNN’s news-gathering operation.

In an opinion piece in Friday’s New York Times, CNN’s news chief, Eason Jordan, wrote: “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.”

In the mid-1990s, according to the executive, one of CNN’s Iraqi cameramen was kidnapped and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s secret police in an effort to force him to identify Jordan as a CIA agent. The network, Jordan said, did not report the incident because “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 great risk.”

Similarly, Jordan wrote, CNN did not report a conversation he had with Hussein’s son, Uday, in which the Iraqi told the network executive that his government planned to assassinate King Hussein of Jordan and two of Saddam’s sons-in-law, who recently had defected to the neighboring Hashemite kingdom. Jordan did privately inform the king, who dismissed the threat. He didn’t warn the Iraqi defectors, who subsequently were lured back to Baghdad and murdered.

According to Jordan, he kept silent because he was sure Uday Hussein “would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting.”

The CNN executive also recounted how he came “to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed.” That went unreported on CNN, as did a recent plot by the regime to kill the network’s reporters in Kurdistan and other lurid, first-hand accounts of torture. One of those involved the repeated beating and ultimate dismemberment of a young Kuwaiti woman caught talking with CNN by telephone. Her body parts were left in a bag on her family’s doorstep.

All this, Jordan said, was done to protect CNN correspondents and employees. But the fact remains that for more than a decade, the network did not tell the full truth about what it knew about Saddam Hussein’s regime. It even withheld this information as this nation struggled to form its conscience concerning the justice of war to depose Hussein. The rest of us are left to wonder how many -- if any -- of these facts were shared with CNN correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer and Richard Roth, who were banned from Iraq for their honest reporting.

Moreover, in October, when New Republic writer Franklin Foer questioned Jordan about his network’s coverage of Iraq, the executive asserted without reservation that CNN had given “a full picture of the regime.”

By Jordan’s own admission, that was a lie.

All this, by Jordan’s tacit admission, was done so that CNN could continue transmitting TV pictures from Baghdad and rolling up those all-important “gets,” the exclusive on-camera interviews on which TV relies.

Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is also a reporter and author with decades of experience of working inside the People’s Republic of China. He offers another perspective from which to judge CNN’s conduct.

“Reporting in and on authoritarian societies -- where one’s staff and colleagues, as well as those whom one interviews, may pay a high price for a foreign correspondent’s reportorial efforts -- does impose a whole set of special constraints and ethical considerations on a journalist that are often very hard to square with by-the-book practices accepted in open societies.

“For example, in a country like Iraq under Saddam Hussein -- or North Korea, China, Vietnam, Libya and Cuba -- correspondents have not always had the same qualms about using hidden cameras or other, less open means to pry information out of a government.” Such means, Schell said, have been used to obtain information on massacres and abuse of political prisoners unobtainable through conventional journalism.

In China, where he has extensive experience, Schell said that many standard American journalistic practices violate strict national security laws and regulations. “Because of authoritarian governments’ penchant to punish those over whom it has control,” Schell said, “a foreign correspondent must be ever mindful of how his or her reportorial activities impact interviewees, locally hired colleagues and even local friends. As Eason Jordan points out, authoritarian regimes all too often take out their anger on whoever has been associated in any way with a story they do not like, just because these people are available to them. The Chinese call this tactic ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkey.’ ”

Schell recalled that “in China, I worked on a story for CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ on forced labor in prisons, in which we did use hidden cameras. Under the circumstances, no one felt that was illegitimate. In fact, [CBS correspondent] Ed Bradley even lured a prison official into a Shanghai hotel room -- staked out with hidden cameras -- to sell tools made with forced convict labor, which is against U.S. law, by posing as an executive with an American hardware wholesale company. No one batted an eye at such practice.”

Similar techniques -- frowned upon or even illegal in open societies -- frequently were employed in Socialist Bloc countries during the Cold War, Schell argued. “The feeling was that since almost all conventional journalistic practices were considered illegal, the terms of the game were different.”

This was also true in Iraq, but what Jordan described was a systematic suppression of information, rather than the bending of accepted journalistic practice to obtain stories that otherwise couldn’t be told. Clearly, part of CNN’s secrecy sprang from a genuine concern for the network’s Iraqi employees and their families. But given the network’s intense competition with Fox and MSNBC and the overwhelming importance all three attach to getting exclusive, real-time images on the air, it is incumbent on CNN to be more forthcoming on what role its desire to maintain a video-generating Baghdad presence played in these decisions.

The foundation of CNN’s 1991 Gulf War triumph was Peter Arnett’s first-person narration of that now-famous footage of the first night’s bombing of Baghdad. What part did the memory of that success play in what now turns out to be a decade-long reluctance to tell the whole truth about what was occurring inside Iraq?

The question that ought now to be asked at CNN Center in Atlanta is whether a fine news organization has traded its birthright for a mess of pictures.