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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (92859)	4/12/2003 1:41:58 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Those claims are irresponsible Paul makes a comment or two about CNN and you accuse him of going over the top???? You really think it's irresponsible to voice an opinion? I guess we're all irresponsible by your standards. Too funny.

To: JohnM who wrote (92859)	4/12/2003 1:58:44 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

John, here's a little taste of the dishonest reporting from CNN and others. I could find a lot more, but we've been down this road before. mrc.org Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on the “Arab Street” The crowds of jubilant Iraqis toppling Saddam Hussein statues underscore a crucial point about journalism from behind enemy lines. Talking about public opinion within a dictatorship is a preposterous — and as yesterday would suggest, highly inaccurate — business. Here, then, is a short review of how tremendously wrong Baghdad-based reporters were about Iraqi opinion: • “Many Iraqis believe America’s true motive is to remove Saddam Hussein from power, install a puppet government and seize Iraq’s vast oil wealth. On the streets, many see Hussein’s offer to allow the inspectors back as a wise, brave decision showing strength.” — NBC’s Ron Allen reporting from Baghdad for the September 17 Nightly News. • “Iraqi reverence for President Saddam Hussein is rarely more expressive than when their leader calls a referendum....Amid even bolder demonstrations of devotion to the Iraqi leader, students at Baghdad’s fine arts school, too young to vote in the last referendum in 1995, appear eager now.” — CNN’s Nic Robertson on American Morning, October 14. • “It’s official, yet still unbelievable! Saddam Hussein re-elected to another seven-year term as President in a referendum where he got 100 percent of the vote! The celebrations were genuine, but already the validity of the vote is being questioned. The Bush administration dismissed the vote as not credible.” — NBC’s Keith Miller on the October 16 Today. • “On the streets of Baghdad, the word to the U.S. is essentially, ‘Put up or shut up!’ People here just don’t believe their President is hiding weapons of mass destruction. These men say the inspectors have found nothing because Iraq has nothing to hide, that the U.S. government’s real agenda is to seize Iraq’s oil fields.” — NBC’s Ann Curry in Baghdad on Today, February 5. • In return for singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to Iraqi kids on the February 10 Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer said “I got a song back. It is a song about Saddam Hussein, his strength and their desire to protect him.” • “Tonight, word of America’s new deadline and threat of war fazed no one at this Baghdad cafe. ‘America is a terrorist country,’ he [one Iraqi man] says.”— NBC’s Ron Allen reporting from Baghdad for the March 7 Nightly News. • On the March 7 GMA, Diane Sawyer asked: “I read this morning that he’s also said the love that the Iraqis have for him is so much greater than anything Americans feel for their President because he’s been loved for 35 years, he says, the whole 35 years.” Dan Harris in Baghdad replied: “He is one to point out quite frequently that he is part of a historical trend in this country of restoring Iraq to its greatness, its historical greatness. He points out frequently that he was elected with a hundred percent margin recently.” • “I asked this man if he thinks the war is about liberating him from Saddam’s brutal regime. ‘Liberation?’ he asked me. ‘Who asked for America to liberate us?’”— ABC reporter Richard Engel, April 2 World News Tonight. • “And people here have been buoyed by the sight of Saddam Hussein on Iraqi television last night....greeting people in a residential area of Baghdad.” — CBS reporter Lara Logan on The Early Show, April 5. In all the liberal media fuss over the quick-trigger anti-Americanism in the Mideast, perhaps yesterday’s reactions will jar reporters who love to “question authority” into wondering about the accuracy of Arab tyrannies in their “Arab street” blustering. Perhaps these regimes should not be considered reliable sources on regional public opinion until they liberate their own “Arab streets.” -- Tim Graham AP Writer Finds Saddam “Stirring” “With U.S.-led forces closing in on Baghdad, a composed Saddam Hussein tried to rally his people and his troops with a stirring address Monday in which he vowed that allied forces would be crushed and ‘victory will be ours soon.’” – Lead paragraph of a March 24 dispatch from Baghdad by Associated Press writer Hamza Hendawi. Arnett Buys Another Iraqi Promise “This morning the Trade Minister Mohammed Saleh told us in a press conference that President Saddam Hussein had personally ordered that these [U.S.] prisoners [of war] be treated well. The Iraqis are aware that there is increasing American concern about the treatment of their people that are being held, a total of I believe, seven now. The Trade Minister said Saddam wants them given the best medicine and the best food.” – National Geographic Explorer’s Peter Arnett reporting from Baghdad for NBC’s Today, March 25.

To: JohnM who wrote (92859)	4/12/2003 2:13:01 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

it's definitely over the top. You had better get out of the way of the Avalanche, John. This story has long, long, legs. Sure, the articles today are from Conservative Media. What do you expect? The Liberal media has gone to the mattress's on this one. They are in hiding. Months ago, when I gave the answer of what to do about the Terrorists as "Get the Bastards!", I never knew it was going to include the joy of watching Ted Turner's operation take a big hit. CRAVEN NEWS NETWORK April 12, 2003 -- CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday revealed that his network had refused for years to report what it knew about Saddam Hussein's murderous atrocities - even against its own journalists. This astonishing confession doesn't just undermine CNN's claim to be "the most trusted name in news" - it wreaks incalculable damage on all journalists' ability to be trusted by the American people. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Jordan disclosed that over the past dozen years CNN kept a tight lid on "awful things that could not be reported, because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff." In return for its silence, CNN was allowed to maintain a permanent Baghdad bureau - long the only one by a U.S. network in the Iraqi capital. But to what point - if the only way to keep the bureau working was to soft-pedal Saddam's horrors? If you can't report the truth, why have journalists there in the first place? It's like saying that the best interests of journalism would have justified suppressing stories on the Holocaust during World War II in order to keep a U.S. news bureau in Berlin so as to be able to tell Nazi Germany's side of the story. Until yesterday, CNN long insisted that its arrangement with Saddam Hussein and his henchmen did not impair its ability to report freely. "CNN has demonstrated again and again that it has a spine," Jordan told NPR's Bob Garfield last October. "It's prepared to be forthright, is forthright in its reporting. We wouldn't have a team in northern Iraq right now if we didn't want to upset the Saddam Hussein regime." Perhaps. But even Peter Arnett, who became a star reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War, conceded to The New Republic's Franklin Foer last fall that "there's a quid pro quo for being there [in Baghdad]. You go in and they control what you do. . . . So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq." Foer's devastating piece detailed how Western reporters - CNN's Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, chief among them - would "mimic the Ba'ath Party line" in a "go along to get along" strategy. And, in fact, CNN worked long and hard over the years to convince Saddam's regime that it could trust the cable network. In a remarkable on-air exchange in 1996, after Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz said Arnett would only be allowed back into Baghdad "if you promise that you will give candid, objective, fair coverage," CNN anchor Bernard Shaw replied: "We have no axes to grind, we don't support any particular government," then pleaded with Aziz to let CNN "enter your country so that we can report both sides of the story." But as we now know, thanks to its chief news executive, that's not what CNN had in mind. Among the stories suppressed by CNN, according to Jordan: * A CNN Iraqi cameraman was kidnapped by Saddam's secret police, then beaten and subjected to electroshock torture for weeks. * Other Iraqis working for Western press organizations similarly disappeared - some for good. * A Kuwaiti woman who had spoken with CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then had her body torn limb from limb, the parts left in a bag on her family's doorstep. * Uday Hussein boasted directly to Jordan that he would assassinate his two brothers-in-law, who had defected. Months later, both men were lured back and killed. Indeed, CNN's silence seems to have cost as many lives as it may have saved. What did it show instead? Foer notes such stories as a series of public "demonstrations" for Sadam's 65th birthday. "Everyone knows they're a sham," one Western journalist told Foer, "but CNN in Atlanta is telling [correspondent] Nic Robertson that he has to file a story, so he shows the demonstration." Selling such propaganda as news is problematic enough. Keeping quiet about the real news - torture, initimidation and murder - makes a mockery of journalists' professed responsibility to be a truth-teller. That's the problem with Faustian bargains - like the one Eason Jordan and CNN made with Saddam Hussein to keep CNN reporting from Baghdad. Ultimately, it means the devil takes possession of your soul for eternity. nypost.com