Recently we were all treated to a journalism ethics whine because a reporter, who was also a surgeon, volunteered to perform emergency brain surgery on a child in Iraq. Now we have Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, telling us in the NY Times about The News We Kept to Ourselves:
Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard ? awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.Lots more in a similar vein. And the closer:
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.So why didn't they just shut the damn Baghdad bureau?
Can someone please parse for me the logic of the journalistic ethics involved here? Bad: neurosurgeon reporter uses medical training to try to save the life of a 2 year old child. Good: news organization allows itself to be terrorized and thereby "guided" in the stories it reports by a bunch of brutal thugs.
Then there are the flies who have made careers out of hovering around the asses of Saddam and his ilk. How long do we have to wait to hear the "gut-wrenching tales" about Peter Arnett and Robert Fisk?
