The Confessions Of Eason Jordan
By Vincent Fiore (04/24/03)
On Friday the 11th of April, the NY Times ran an op-ed piece from CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan. Now, having read thousands of opinion pieces and many books ranging from the astute brilliance of George Will to the impractical denunciations of former President Carter, I have become accustomed to being dazzled or dismayed on a daily basis. Truly though, I was not prepared for the piece of Mr. Jordan. It left me in a sought of surrealistic seasickness, a kind of nightmare dream state, only I was all too awake and fully grasped the gravity of it. To be sure, I had to reread it three times; and if you have not yet read or heard of Mr. Jordan's barring of soul in the pages of the Times, seek it out. {WWW.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD}
After reading the piece, what struck me were the awful tales of human suffering, and Jordan's and henceforth, CNN, breathtakingly willful disregard for truth in reporting. Even the penning of this betrayal of news by CNN seemed almost cavalier in its empathetic outreach to all involved, or so it seemed to me. Only at the end of his work does Mr. Jordan inform the reader of how "awful I felt having these stories bottled up inside me". Totally self-serving, and totally unacceptable when put into the context of the political rollercoaster the world has been on these past 12 years regarding Iraq.
This revelation of Eason Jordan also left me with many poignant questions. Did CNN willfully and by design color their reporting in and of Iraq? Apparently, they did, if one reads the piece the way I did. Did Mr. Jordan, being the chief news executive, put substance over people in its efforts to maintain a CNN Baghdad bureau office? Again, so it seems. When you put reporters into a known hazard, as Jordan did, does this speak to the journalistic bravery, or integrity of the CNN media brass? When you report by omission over a 12 year time period regarding one of history's most brutal monsters, it does not. After all, can anybody now say what we have seen and heard from CNN in relation to Saddam Hussein is fact or fiction? The prudent viewer would have to say no.
What Mr. Jordan's article has done {unintended, though really, unavoidable} is lend foundation to all of the "right wing conspirators" among us who for years have lamented the liberal bias in the media. This confession of Jordan's can rightly be extended to how CNN has covered politics on the whole in this country since the very beginnings of Ted Turner's opus, and not just this war. What else have they failed to report? Has Peter Arnett always been sympathetic to Iraq and its regime? And was it a "staged" act that just went too far? Or Christian Amanpour, who has throughout her years said many a discouraging word regarding American foreign policy, and in particular President Bush's handling of the war on terrorism? These displays of bias have always been noticed by Conservatives and rightly attributed to Western elite media in the position of shaping opinion.
The gulf war in 1991 put CNN on the map as the first 24-hour news cycle in history. America watched over their dinner plates as the war unfolded in all its terrible majesty. CNN had become larger than life. Enthralled by the pictures from the battlefield, the millions watched at home and abroad. What has happened over the years to CNN, and its chief news executives, is a developed callousness to truth in journalism and a subjugation to tow the Liberal political line. At the very least, a watering down of the facts was adhered to as plainly and starkly evidenced by the Eason Jordan confession in the Times.
In an especially gripping paragraph, Jordan describes how a cameraman was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for weeks. He {Jordan} choose to say nothing. Apparently, a little torture went a long way, as CNN remained active in Baghdad. To most of us who live in Normal, USA, it is a no brainer to get your people out of there and expose Saddam for who he is. To Eason Jordan, it was CNN news first, reporters lives second. And the additional sidebar to these sad events over the last 12 years was the protecting of the Iraqi regime. Could CNN have possibly saved lives by making their findings public and petitioning a then-friend in the White House, namely William Jefferson Clinton? Probably not, when looking back on Clinton's foreign policy escapades. But then again, do we really know?
The lurid confessions of Eason Jordan remind us of the power of the elite media. In its newsrooms and bureau's, they have the power through free thought and speech to make sinners into saints {examples: Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev} and winners into losers. {Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, Robert Bork} Eason Jordan has, in this writer's opinion, betrayed a trust that is near sacrosanct in American life and indispensable as the great equalizer the founding fathers hoped it would be. The press and the media have a charge to keep with the peoples of the world, and through Eason Jordan's misguided motives, that charge was shelved for ratings.
Freedom of the press has never meant freedom of the facts. By not shining the light of truth about the brutal Iraqi regime, Jordan has possibly contributed to the many casualties of Saddam's rule that otherwise may have been avoided. Though I cannot say with any certainty that this is so, others cannot claim that it could not. The Media has, 2nd to the Presidential bully pulpit, the biggest stage of all. And even the President in needs must use the media as an echo chamber of sorts.
Think back to May 16 of 2002, when Hillary Clinton held up an edition of the NY Post in the Senate chamber that proclaimed "Bush Knew", the headline implying the president knew of the Sept. 11th bombings in August of 2001. Although it was complete rubbish, it caused many hearts to skip a beat and much gnashing of teeth on Capitol Hill. The country was now dividing over the Presidents assumed culpability. Literally thousands of stories were written and conspirator theorist came out of the woodwork to claim knowledge of something that never happened. All because of a headline. It is this power that the Eason Jordan's of CNN and the like can command with their words and reporting.
Freedom of the press is something worth fighting for. Freedom to obfuscate fact is not.
Eason Jordan owes the American people, and all interested parties, an apology, and another syndicated op-ed piece, titled "My resignation from CNN".
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