Dead Messengers:How the U.S. Military Threatens Journalists

http://www.truthout.org/overview.htm

Dead Messengers:
Do American soldiers purposely kill journalists, as CNN's Eason Jordan supposedly said? Or, could the problem be even worse?


How the U.S. Military Threatens Journalists
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Investigation

Part I: Hearing What Eason Jordan Said

Thursday 24 February 2005

Eason Jordan, CNN's freshly ousted news chief, hardly knew what hit him. On Thursday, January 27, he was schmoozing with the global A-List at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On Friday, February 11, he was looking for work.

"After 23 years at CNN," he wrote, "I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."

"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise."

Corporate media managers had long envied Jordan's diplomatic skill, as when he arranged CNN's live coverage from Baghdad of the first Gulf War. But political conservatives reviled him for being "too liberal." They also felt he had cozied up to Saddam.

The right-wingers got that right, as many political progressives agreed. In an April 2003 Op-Ed for the New York Times, Jordan admitted that he had personally held back news that the Iraqis had tortured a CNN staff member. To run the story would have jeopardized the network's access and made it necessary to remove some or all of its people working in the country. <snip>

:-)

about the CBS memos about Bush - where the controversy overtakes the truth of the issue.