The Meaning of
CNN's Confession
By Susan Shelley
Two days after the fall of Baghdad, CNN's chief news
executive Eason Jordan confessed in a New York Times editorial that he concealed
knowledge of the vicious and brutal tactics of Saddam Hussein's regime in
order to protect CNN's Baghdad bureau and the Iraqi employees on the bureau's
staff.
Now it can be told, he wrote, that an Iraqi cameraman
was beaten and tortured with electricity in a basement for weeks, that a
Kuwaiti woman who phoned CNN was beaten daily for months while her father
was forced to watch, and that she was later returned to her family as a heap
of bloody body parts stuffed in a plastic bag.
Now it can be told, he wrote, how the regime kept
its employees in line, that an aide to Saddam's son had his front teeth ripped
out with pliers and a high official in the information ministry was missing
all his fingernails.
Now it can be told, he wrote, that CNN reporters were
threatened, that Iraqi employees vanished, that whispered stories of unspeakable
torture were punctuated by assassinations.
CNN concealed all this for a dozen years.
Does it matter?
Does it matter if a respected news organization covers
a dictator with deference and credulity, while covering the leaders of the
free world with the open skepticism appropriate to a free press?
We have just seen that it matters quite a lot.
In the months leading up to the military action in
Iraq, many people--some of them on the U.N. Security Council--said with a
straight face that George W. Bush, not Saddam Hussein, represented the greater
threat to the world. There was a serious debate, difficult to believe today,
over whether the Iraqi people would rise up in support of the regime and
curse the American invaders for generations to come.
CNN has reporters in many places ruled by dictatorships,
including Cuba. Will Eason Jordan someday confess to concealing similar coercion
by the Castro regime? It will be too late for little Elian Gonzalez, ripped
from freedom and thrown back to Cuba after months of TV coverage portraying
Fidel Castro as a lovable uncle.
Eason Jordan says he was just trying to protect his
people, but it is not hard to imagine how fast CNN would abandon its Atlanta
headquarters in disgust if the Georgia legislature passed a law condoning
lynching. CNN stayed in Baghdad, protecting the regime by misrepresenting
the truth.
Why?
The answer may lie in the belief that the United States
is, in its own way, just as bad as the Baghdad regime. And that belief can
only rest on the premise that freedom is not important, or not most
important.
After all, the United States is a free country in
which some people have great wealth and others have nothing, and the government
does not have the power to equalize the results of their efforts.
It is the belief in equality at any cost that explains
the sneering contempt for political leaders who refuse to support policies
to redistribute wealth, like higher taxes on people who earn more money.
It is the belief in equality at any cost that explains the willingness to
overlook the brutality of totalitarian regimes.
Say what you will about Saddam Hussein, he tortured
the highest official and the lowest peasant with equal savagery.
It is the passion for equality that leads otherwise
intelligent people to dismiss freedom as something saccharine and fundamentally
false, a hypocritical platitude that doesn't fool a sophisticated mind.
This is dangerous nonsense.
Enforced equality can only be maintained by a government
of unlimited power. People who live under such governments have clung to
rafts in shark-infested waters to get to freedom. They have toppled statues
in Moscow and chipped the Berlin Wall apart with pick-axes. They have stared
down tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Now, thanks to an American president who did not listen
to sneering sophisticates, they have set fire to portraits of Saddam
Hussein.
April 14, 2003
© Copyright 2003 by Susan
Shelley
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