BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, April 18, 2003
Liberation abroad, repression at
home. Even as the liberation of Iraq continues, we're a long way
from liberation in this country when it comes to gay men and
lesbians.
Two pieces in today's New York
Times illustrate that the silliness -- actually, it's quite a bit
worse than silliness -- continues. Christopher Marquis reports on the
secrecy that lesbian and gay couples in the military must engage in
so that they can stay clear of the ridiculous "don't
ask, don't tell"
policy.
And Erica Goode finds that the
government is making it increasingly difficult for scientists who
study AIDS to win grants if their applications use "provocative"
phrases such as "anal
sex" and "sex workers." You
really can't make this stuff up.
By the way, this week's
Phoenix features an article by Kristen Lombardi on the legal
struggle for same-sex
marriage in Massachusetts
-- a case before the Supreme Judicial Court that could be decided
within the next few months.
posted at 9:12 AM |
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Big Dig II. So, is there any
truth to the rumor that the White House has hired former Big Dig
chief Jim
Kerasiotes to make sure
that Bechtel
stays on time and on budget in Iraq?
posted at 9:12 AM |
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A loan for lean times. It
looks like at least some state officials are finally coming to their
senses. The Boston Globe's Rick Klein reports that legislators
are thinking about borrowing
money in order to get
through a temporary fiscal crisis rather than to continue to inflict
pain on those who depend on government services.
There's a lot of blather right now
about the legislature's refusal to go along with Governor Mitt
Romney's reforms. No doubt some of the reforms that Romney has
proposed are worthy. So are the ones being pushed by a
few reformist Democrats
(getting rid of the Governor's Council and the Quinn bill for
starters), described in a column today by the Globe's Scot
Lehigh.
No one, though, thinks these
reforms will add up to more than a pittance. Yes, the ones that make
sense should be enacted. But real human needs should not be held
hostage to them, either.
posted at 9:11 AM |
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You don't say?
"Madonna's
Real Art: Getting Attention."
From today's New York Times. (With apologies to
James
Taranto.)
posted at 9:10 AM |
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The absolute last way you would
ever want to blow a perfectly good day. Spend
an afternoon with Jose Canseco.
And pay for the privilege.
posted at 9:09 AM |
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Media Log on CNN. As of
right now, I'm scheduled to appear on CNN's Reliable
Sources on Sunday at
11:30 a.m. to discuss the Eason Jordan situation with host Howard
Kurtz. I'm told Jordan will be there,
too.
posted at 9:07 AM |
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Thursday, April 17, 2003
Unfair to CNN's Jordan.
Reader KH writes that the Washington Post editorial page --
and,
thus, Media Log -- was
unfair to CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan on
Tuesday.
KH asks me to look again at this
section of the
Post editorial:
If the network had also
told its viewers that Mr. Jordan dealt with an Iraqi official
whose teeth had been pried out for upsetting his boss, Uday
Hussein, then those watching the electoral story might have felt
differently about that report, about the election result and about
a regime that terrified its citizens into proclaiming their
unanimous support.
Next, KH quotes this passage from
Jordan's memo to the CNN staff, a copy of which Jordan had sent to
Media Log and which I ran in full in the very item that KH takes
issue with:
When an Iraqi official,
Abbas al-Janabi, defected after his teeth were yanked out with
pliers by Uday Saddam Hussein's henchmen, I worked to ensure the
defector gave his first TV interview to CNN. He did.
KH asks: "[D]o you see the
contradiction here?" Well, yes. Media Log is glad to set the record
straight, and awaits word on when the Post will do the
same.
Meanwhile, Boston Globe
columnists Ellen
Goodman and
Jeff
Jacoby let Jordan have it
today.
posted at 7:45 AM |
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Partisan Review and the
varieties of Trotskyism. Media Log is way too unlettered to have
anything intelligent to say about the
demise of the legendary Partisan
Review, which has been
defunded by Boston University chancellor John Silber. (When you're
ripe, it's time to go, eh, Dr. Silber?)
But this assessment in
Slate, by Sam
Tanenhaus, is smart and
entertaining. I'll leave it to others to judge whether he also
happens to be right.
posted at 7:45 AM |
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New in this week's
Phoenix. This week I take a look at whether the media's
renewed commitment to foreign-news
coverage will survive the
transition from the shooting war in Iraq to the much more difficult
effort to rebuild the country.
Also, I write about Boston
Herald reporter Jules Crittenden's astounding account about
helping
to kill Iraqi soldiers who
were trying to kill him and the American troops with whom he was
embedded.
posted at 7:44 AM |
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Wednesday, April 16, 2003
More questions for CNN's
Jordan. Not all the news coming out of CNN is bad these days.
The
wretched Crossfire
is getting bumped to the dead zone to make way for Paula Zahn, and
Aaron Brown is still employed, buzz to the contrary notwithstanding.
(The headline on Media
Whores Online: "Rumors
Swirl that Brown too Competent for CNN.")
But the controversy that has
engulfed chief news executive Eason Jordan hasn't died down quite
yet. Nor should it.
If you haven't read Peter Collins's
commentary in yesterday's Washington Times yet, well, hop to
it. I'm a day late to this particular car crash, but Collins
is devastating. He
describes working at CNN in 1993 and being upbraided for showing
insufficient on-air enthusiasm regarding some lie-filled blather from
Saddam Hussein at a time when Jordan and CNN's then-president, Tom
Johnson, were trying to line up an interview with Saddam.
I suspect this would have gotten
more attention if it were not for the fact that Collins's account is
essentially uncorroborated, and that it was published in the lightly
regarded WashTimes. But what motives would Collins have to
make this stuff up?
Also, Hub Blogger Jay
Fitzgerald has absolutely nailed
Jordan on a detail that
appears to have eluded everyone else, including Media Log. Jordan, in
his
op-ed in the New York
Times last Friday, wrote about a Kuwaiti woman who was tortured
and murdered for the crime of giving an interview to CNN -- one of
several horrific stories Jordan sat on until now, citing the need to
protect CNN's people in Iraq.
But wait. As Fitzgerald notes,
Kuwait was liberated 12 years ago. Why did Jordan believe he needed
to remain silent all these years? Fitzgerald's conclusion: "They sold
their souls for access."
posted at 8:11 AM |
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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Eason Jordan defends his
choice. CNN's Eason Jordan has written to Media Log to offer his
side in the controversy over the op-ed piece that he wrote for the
New York Times last Friday. Jordan writes:
Dan:
While we probably will agree to
disagree on some things about CNN's history in Iraq, I wanted you
to know my side of the story. I shared this note with my CNN
colleagues yesterday:
Since my op-ed piece in the New
York Times Friday stirred a controversy, I want to share my
thoughts with you about it. In the op-ed, I described how the
Iraqi regime intimidated, tortured, and killed people who helped
CNN over the years. It was a tough piece to write. But I felt
strongly the stories needed to be told as soon as telling them
would not automatically result in the killing of innocent
colleagues, friends, and acquaintances -- most of them
Iraqis.
Some critics complain that the
op-ed piece proves CNN withheld vital information from the public
and kowtowed to the Saddam Hussein regime to maintain a CNN
reporting presence in Iraq. That is nonsense. No news organization
in the world had a more contentious relationship with the Iraqi
regime than CNN. The Iraqi leadership was so displeased with CNN's
Iraq reporting, CNN was expelled from Iraq six times -- five times
in previous years and one more time on day three of this Iraq war.
Those expulsions lasted as long as six months at a time. CNN's
Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, was banned from the country in
response to her reporting on an unprecedented public protest
demanding to know what happened to Iraqis who vanished years
earlier after being abducted by Iraqi secret police. Christiane
Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Aaron Brown, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson,
Rym Brahimi, Sheila MacVicar, Ben Wedeman, and Richard Roth were
among the other CNN correspondents and anchors banned from Iraq.
If CNN were trying to kowtow and maintain its Baghdad presence at
any cost, would CNN's reporting have produced a contentious
relationship, expulsions, and bannings? No. CNN kept pushing
for access in Iraq, while never compromising its journalistic
standards in doing so. Withholding information that would get
innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a
journalistic sin.
Did CNN report on the brutality
of the regime? Yes, as best we could, mostly from outside Iraq,
where people in the know could speak more freely than people
inside Iraq. In Saddam's Iraq, no one was foolish enough to speak
on camera or on the record about the brutality of the regime
because anyone doing so would be effectively signing his or her
death warrant. So we reported on Iraq's human rights record from
outside Iraq and featured many interviews with Iraqi defectors who
described the regime's brutality in graphic detail. When an Iraqi
official, Abbas al-Janabi, defected after his teeth were yanked
out with pliers by Uday Saddam Hussein's henchmen, I worked to
ensure the defector gave his first TV interview to CNN. He
did. I also personally asked Tariq Aziz in a live TV
interview during one of our World Report Conferences to defend his
country's dreadful human rights record. Other CNNers over the
years also put tough questions to Iraqi officials.
Some critics say if I had told
my Iraq horror stories sooner, I would have saved thousands of
lives. How they come to that conclusion, I don't know. Iraq's
human rights record and the brutality of the Saddam Hussein regime
were well known before I wrote my op-ed piece. The only sure thing
that would have happened if I told those stories sooner is the
regime would have tracked down and killed the innocent people who
told me those stories. Critics say I could have told the
stories without identifying Iraqis by name. But the Iraqi
secret police surely knew everyone I met in Iraq and would have
had no trouble identifying who told me the stories. No doubt those
people would be dead today if I spoke sooner.
A number of people have told me
CNN should have closed its Baghdad bureau, helped everyone who
told me the horror stories flee Iraq, with me thereafter telling
those stories publicly long before now. While that is a noble
thought, doing so was not a viable option. Iraqis (and their
families) who told me those stories in some cases could not, and
in other cases would not, leave their country simply for the sake
of CNN being able to share their stories with the world.
Incidentally, there are countless such horror stories in Iraq. I
knew just a few of them. We will hear many more of them in
the days, weeks, and months ahead.
Knowing the personal stories I
knew about the brutality of the regime, I had three
options:
1. Never repeat such horror
stories.
2. Tell the stories sooner and,
as a result, see innocent people killed.
3. Tell the stories after the
downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime.
I chose option three and could
never imagine doing anything else.
I chose to write the NY Times
op-ed to provide a record of one person's experiences with the
brutality of the Iraqi regime and to ensure we maintain CNN's long
record of reporting on atrocities around the world, even if in
these cases we could do so only years later to protect the lives
of innocent people.
Eason
Jordan has obviously been anguished
over this for some time. But I think a serious issue remains: by
Jordan's own admission, CNN's reporting was compromised over the past
decade because its top news executive knew terrible things about the
regime of Saddam Hussein that he could not say.
What should he have done
differently? Here's one possibility: he simply should have pulled CNN
out of Iraq and explained that the regime was not allowing the
network to report on the country fully and honestly.
At a time when Fox News and MSNBC
have been all but marching into battle on behalf of the White House,
CNN has been a sober and serious alternative. Unfortunately, we now
know that CNN's reporting on Iraq has been compromised all along.
Yes, CNN and the Iraqi government had contentious relations, and I
don't doubt that CNN was as tough on the regime as Jordan dared. But
at a certain point, ethics dictate that you seriously consider
walking away.
The Washington Post today
has a tough editorial on the
choice Jordan made. Its
conclusion is worth pondering:
It is difficult to make
judgments in retrospect, but some CNN reporting did seem
deliberately unprovocative, given the true nature of the regime.
An election last autumn, which Saddam Hussein won with 100 percent
of the votes, was interpreted as a "message of defiance to U.S.
President George Bush," for example. If the network had also told
its viewers that Mr. Jordan dealt with an Iraqi official whose
teeth had been pried out for upsetting his boss, Uday Hussein,
then those watching the electoral story might have felt
differently about that report, about the election result and about
a regime that terrified its citizens into proclaiming their
unanimous support.
Justified or not, that is the
perception that CNN is now going to have to overcome.
posted at 11:25 AM |
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Another view on CNN's
Jordan. Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard's Kennedy School,
makes a case for going slow on the matter of CNN
chief news executive Eason Jordan,
who confessed in last Friday's New York Times to covering up
shocking acts by the Iraqi government in order to protect his own
people.
"I think he stays. I think he made
choices that every news organization has to make in a tough
situation," Jones tells Media Log. And though he adds, "What I
question is whether the access that he was essentially making that
bargain for was at too dear a price," he also says: "I certainly
wouldn't fire him for this. This is an anguishing
situation."
Perhaps Jones's most salient point
is that though Jordan is the first news executive to speak out about
the unholy alliances that were made in order to keep reporters in
Iraq, he may by no means be the last.
"We're going to have to hear from
other news organizations, it seems to me," says Jones. "I would be
very reluctant to cast the first stone." Noting that news
organizations will bend to maintain access, Jones says, "It may be
that he bent too far, but I've got a feeling that everybody is bent.
That goes with being in a terrible place."
I'm too appalled by Jordan's
actions to agree with Jones, but I certainly agree with him on this:
let's have full disclosure from every major news executive who
had to negotiate issues of access with the regime of Saddam Hussein,
especially in the years following the Gulf War.
It might very well make for a
fascinating and disturbing story.
posted at 7:50 AM |
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Where is Salam?
"Salam
Pax," the Baghdad resident
whose blog, "Where
Is Raed?", made for some of
the most gripping reading of the war, has not been heard from since
March 24. Here's hoping he'll surface soon.
posted at 7:50 AM |
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The war must really be winding
down. The Boston Herald is bringing Jules
Crittenden home and
expanding the "Inside Track" to two pages, complete with new
headshots of Tracksters Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa. You don't really
get the effect from the online version, but here
it is anyway.
posted at 7:50 AM |
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They're laughing at you. Your
stock portfolio is down 90 percent, but be of good cheer: the CEOs of
the companies you've invested in are still living the good life.
They're
giving you the finger, and
the Boston Globe's Beth Healy has the details.
posted at 7:49 AM |
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Monday, April 14, 2003
Foer's revenge.
Franklin
Foer, who was attacked by
CNN last fall after writing a piece for the New Republic on
how the network toadied to Saddam Hussein, responds today on
OpinionJournal.com to CNN
news chief Eason Jordan's shocking
admissions in last Friday's
New York Times.
Jordan described covering up his
knowledge of terrible human-rights abuses in order to protect his own
people in Iraq and to guarantee continued access.
As Foer observes, "Leaving ...
might have been preferable to staying under these conditions." Those
are words worth contemplating as Jordan and his superiors contemplate
his future at CNN as well.
posted at 8:03 AM |
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Life, death, and
objectivity. Here are a few of Roget's synonyms for
objectivity:
"detachment," "disinterest," "dispassion," "fairness," and
"impartiality." In journalism, fairness and impartiality are good;
but detachment and dispassion are more suitable for a certified
public accountant than for someone who's trying to bring a story home
in all of its vivid truth.
The Boston Herald's embedded
reporter, Jules
Crittenden, described the
limits of objectivity in an astounding account for the Sunday paper,
recounting how he called out Iraqi positions as his unit rolled
through Baghdad, thus helping to kill three Iraqi soldiers. He
writes:
Some in our profession
might think as a reporter and non-combatant, I was there only to
observe. Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three human
beings in the war I was sent to cover, I'm sure there are some
people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I'll keep
the argument short. Screw them, they weren't there. But they are
welcome to join me next time if they care to test their
professionalism.
Crittenden's account comes closer
than anything I've read in this three-week war to making me feel as
though I were there, and experiencing for myself the abject fear and
its close cousin, exhiliration, that define combat.
But of course, this isn't
objectivity -- a bogus concept in any case -- or, for that matter, a
fair, comprehensive view of what's going on in Iraq. The reality is
that Crittenden's account illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of
the embed program.
The strength, of course, is that it
gives us a close-up look and otherwise-unattainable insight into what
it's like for American soldiers to fight this war. The weakness is
that the embeds' accounts necessarily become the story of the war as
seen through the eyes of American soldiers.
No reporter is going to be
"objective" about those who are protecting his or her life. And
Crittenden's assistance in killing Iraqi troops who were trying to
kill him is perfectly understandable. Who among us wouldn't do
exactly the same thing? But it also -- as Crittenden acknowledges --
calls into serious question the role of journalists as
non-combatants, thus turning reporters into legitimate targets for
those against whom we are fighting.
Overall, the embed program has a
been a real plus. But as Crittenden shows, there are hazards to it as
well. He deserves credit for describing those hazards so
honestly.
posted at 7:51 AM |
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A broken people. One of the
reasons I opposed this war was the certainty of massive civilian
casualties, something that has indeed come to pass despite what were
apparently our best efforts to keep such tragedies to a
minimum.
This story by Ian Fisher in today's
New York Times about a mother who couldn't bring herself to
tell her husband about the
death of their three daughters
is heart-wrenching. Even if we succeed in helping the Iraqis build a
better society, this family will never have a chance to enjoy
it.
Yet I am struck, too, by how
psychologically damaged Iraq has been left by 30 years of Baath Party
rule. In yesterday's Boston Globe, reporter Thanassis
Cambanis quoted a mother as
saying:
It's true Saddam used to
take our sons and torture them. But how can I say whether this is
worth our liberation? I still don't know what's going to
happen.
Think about the complete loss of
dignity that would lead someone to say so humiliating, so degrading.
These are people who have been completely stripped of their humanity.
Such are the effects of totalitarianism.
posted at 7:49 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
