ROME — So much for freedom or speech or the slightest media dissent on the U.S. conduct in the war in Iraq.

CNN’s top news exec Eason Jordan resigned after a ton of bricks and rightwing pressure fell on his head after he opined at a closed OFF THE RECORD meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos two weeks ago that he believed that as many as 12 journalists had been killed by US military forces in Iraq. His remarks triggered a controversy in the room, and once the exchange was made public, he began rapidly backing away from the statement.

CNN’s competitors went on the attack with Fox News and the NY post in the lead lambasting Jordan for “sliming our troops.” A Michelle Malkin column in the Post (She is also a Fox contributor) actually conflated Jordan’s personal comments into CNN policy and made it appear that CNN was attacking our troops. As politicians spoke out condemning any such suggestion, Jordan went silent and has now resigned, forced out it seems clear. He is being punished for deviating from the official line woven though demands for independent investigations of journalists killed by the military have gone underanswered.

Here is what CNN said:

“After 23 years at CNN, 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.”

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/11/easonjordan.cnn/

I discussed this incident at the World Tribunal on Iraq session on media wrongs yesterday. I showed a clip from my film WMD that shows the attack on the Palestine Hotel on April 8 2003 in Baghdad as well as the killing of Al Jazeera’s Tareq Ayoub at the Arab Media Center by a US air attack. In both cases, demands for an investigation have gone unanswered.

CNN has shamefully not reported the full context but clearly buckled under withering attack with Jordan taking the heat and showing clearly that you cannot even raise the possibility of US government abuses in Iraq without being targeted — unless as in the case of Abu Ghraib, you have pictures.

Yesterday at the Tribunal we saw films and heard a report by independent journalist Dahr Jamail on the massacre of civilians in Fallujah. (journalists were not allowed to witness much of this ” turkey shoot”).

It is well known that the US military has been hostile to independent reporting from Iraq and that journalists have been threatened, warned and intimidated.

Phillip Knightly, the acknowledged expert on the history of war and the media writes in David Miller’s fine book TELL ME LIES on propaganda in Iraq that “there will be no investigation… I believe that the occasional shots fired at media sites are not accidental and that war correspondents will now be targeted.”

There is more to t his Eason Jordan story that meets the eye. He was an excellent newsman although he did admit that CNN did not publicize Iraqi attacks on his staff in the Saddam days to keep CNN’s office open. He also admitted “vetting” (i.e. getting approval for) CNN military experts who commented on the invasion on air.

So far no one has a record of what Jordan did say or what others said in Davos. What is clear is that silence is the price that executives must now pay to keep their jobs.

As a former CNN producer, a “Turner turnover,” I find this very sad and condemn it for what it is: a chilling of debate and an avoidance of the real issue who the US military has managed and influenced media coverage of the war and been involved in incidents that many in the field — not just Jordan — believed showed clear targeting of journalists.

Here in Italy, Italians are demanding the release of one of their independent journalists being held by kidnappers and threatened for death. At the Tribunal, the famous economist Samir Amin asked why is that only independent journalists are being targeted this way. How do we know who the people holding them are?

The suggestion — that we cannot rule out covert actions by special operations teams posing as terrorists. Farfetched? Not if you look at the way these units have operated in the past.

This is a sad day for journalism… and another sign on how our media is being pressured to tow the line.

From Rome,
Your News Dissector,
Danny Schechter

Write dissector@mediachannel.org