Trackbacked at the Pirate’s Cove:
From Editor & Publisher via The Jawa Report:
ITEM 1: On April 11, 2003, Eason Jordan, the former CNN news division chief and Baghdad bureau chief, revealed that CNN knew about human rights abuses committed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein since 1990, but the network refrained from coverage of them in order to gain better access to information on Hussein’s government. Eason did not want to lose his (and his network’s) ability to “scoop” news stories in Iraq, so instead of reporting on what was actually going on in Iraq under Saddam he instead continued a series of stories on how “good” life was under Saddam.
ITEM 2: In November 2004 at the News Xchange conference in Portugal, Jordan claimed that United States armed forces were arresting and torturing non-coalition Arabic journalists in Iraq. He also claimed that American troops were intentionally killing these journalists, even though he knew this story was patently false. He later tried to “apologize and correct” the story, saying that “he had misspoken”. He could have said, ‘Oops, I did something stupid, I’m sorry,’ but instead he came out with obfuscating statements. This led to his early retirement from CNN, although several CNN staffers say Jordan was eased out by top executives in embarrassment.
ITEM 3: Eason Jordan is now back in the news, launching the “IraqSlogger” site. The name of his new venture, he says, was inspired by a Donald Rumsfeld reference to this war being a “long, hard slog.”
“Iraq is the story of our time,” he declares. His goal for the site is for it to become nothing less than “the world’s premier Iraq-focused information source” — and with no “political slant.”
No. Political. Slant.
Yeah, I believe you.
Eason Jordan, CNN, Iraq, IraqSlogger
