The Jordanian crisis

It’s difficult to find any follow-up on Eason Jordan’s confession in his Times op-ed column yesterday that CNN covered up news of atrocities committed by the regime of Saddam Hussein. The best stuff I can find is Web-only commentary, all of which is keyed to Franklin Foer’s on-the-money piece in the New Republic last October: “Air war.”
Foer’s October 2002 piece concludes: “When I asked CNN’s Jordan to explain why his network is so devoted to maintaining a perpetual Baghdad presence, he listed two reasons: ‘First, because it’s newsworthy; second, because there’s an expectation that if anybody is in Iraq, it will be CNN.’ His answer reveals the fundamental attitude of most Western media: Access to Baghdad is an end in itself, regardless of the intellectual or moral caliber of the journalism such access produces. An old journalistic aphorism holds ‘access is a curse.’ The Iraqi experience proves it can be much worse than that.”
James Glassman has a good column on (at?) TechCentralStation: “Sins of omission.” Glenn Reynolds asks whether the scandal is “A journalistic Enron?” (Thanks to KausFiles for steering us in the right direction.)

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