The journalist who wrote the Aug. 14 article, Christina Davidson, was in an awkward spot:
“War Made Easy” directly criticizes her boss, and it was the subject of the article.
Davidson’s only assessment of the film that wasn’t favorable had to do
with its criticisms of Jordan. “While there’s no doubt that
journalistic laziness contributed to the uncritical re-broadcasting of
the Bush administration’s official line,” she wrote, “Solomon takes it
a little too far in trying to make the case that all of the cable
networks were actively complicit in promoting the war. Solomon bases
his reasoning primarily on one choice quote from Eason Jordan, former
CNN news chief and current CEO of IraqSlogger’s parent company,
Praedict.”
In fact, the film provides a wide range of evidence that “all of the
cable networks were actively complicit in promoting the war” — the
result of chronic biases rather than “journalistic laziness.” And CNN,
like the rest of the cable news operations, comes in for plenty of
tough scrutiny in the documentary. As the magazine Variety noted in a
review of “War Made Easy” on Aug. 13, “
Fox News is predictably bashed here, but supposedly neutral CNN gets it even harder.”
CNN is among the news outlets at the core of the myth of “the liberal
media” — perpetuated, in part, by the fact that people are often overly
impressed by the significance of rhetorical attacks on some media
organizations by more conservative outlets. (Before his resignation
from CNN in 2005, Eason Jordan was himself subjected to denunciations
from the right — for allegedly skewing news coverage to curry favor
with the Baghdad government during Saddam’s rule and, after the
invasion, for reportedly stating that U.S. troops had targeted some
journalists in Iraq.) But antipathy from right-wing pundits is hardly
an indication of journalistic independence.
Stretching to defend Jordan’s CNN record, IraqSlogger complains that
the CEO of its parent company is unfairly characterized in the film:
“Solomon assumes that Jordan was seeking the blessing of Pentagon
officials on the propriety of his choices, when in fact he was just
doing a boss’s duty.”
The article then provides a quote from Jordan, supplying his
explanation to set the record straight: “Employers routinely vet
prospective employees with their previous employers. In these cases, we
vetted retired generals to ensure they were experts in specific
military and geographic areas. The generals were not vetted for
political views.”
The explanation can only flunk the laugh test.
Eason Jordan was CNN’s chief news executive when, on April 20, 2003 (a
month after U.S. troops invaded Iraq), he appeared on CNN and revealed
that he’d gotten the Defense Department’s approval of which retired
high-ranking officers to put on the network’s payroll. “I went to the
Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with
important people there and said, for instance — ‘At CNN, here are the
generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off
about the war’ — and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was
important.”
With war euphoria riding high, Jordan was eager to shore up his — and
CNN’s — image as cooperative pals of the nation’s military commanders.
Now, Jordan is trying some backspin with the claim that he was merely
checking job references.
“Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the
journalists themselves to do independent reporting,” I note in the
documentary. “But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so
much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of
it.” What Jordan did on behalf of CNN “wasn’t even something to hide,
ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on his own
network, ‘See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re
on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.’ And that really
runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press. And that
suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the
U.S. is involved in a war based on lies.”
Part of that deadly avoidance comes when powerful news executives do
the bidding of the Pentagon — and then, later on, claim that they did
nothing of the kind.
The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death” — based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same
title, narrated by Sean Penn and produced by the Media Education
Foundation — is available on DVD.
Writings 
The man who ran CNN’s news operation during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary’s evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His current denial says a lot about how “liberal media” outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
