The "CNN Factor" and Kosovo

After allegedly implying that the U.S. military was deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq, veteran CNN executive Eason Jordan felt the heat and resigned. Many implications have been drawn from this event by both the so-called Right and Left. Yet they have largely missed the fundamental irony underpinning the whole affair, which shows that Jordan is being both attacked and defended for all the wrong reasons.

The Two Camps

This failure owes to the opinion-based point of view shared by both "sides." For the pro-Bush critics in the "blogosphere" who claim victory for his demise, Jordan's alleged comments were unpatriotic and thus irresponsible – just another example of how the "liberal media" disrespects and in fact despises America's armed forces.

What most commentators concluded was that the CNN exec represented, like that other recently ousted high-profile media figure, Dan Rather, the face of "old-school journalism." When the alleged "new media" – as represented by the "citizen journalists" of the blogosphere – decided to go to town on them with vigor, the two quickly became history. Of course, one could also claim that the real old-school journalism, if a dying art, is more accurately represented in all its variety by muckrakers like Seymour Hersh and eloquent political biographers such as Bob Woodward. But that's besides the point.

The Case for Journalism

The whole event, or non-event, actually became spun into an issue about standards: for the Eason-bashers, it became a question of the patriotism of the left-wing media versus the self-sworn defenders of American honor. Others fretted that the latter's newfound power is worrying, since they had achieved their goal based on cited testimony that could not be backed up by evidence; thus the conjecture of the rabble winning out over the sober professionalism of the "old-school" media. If a distinguished and experienced news executive such as Jordan could be eliminated by activist bloggers based on things that no one was even sure he said, who could save journalism from the tabloid anarchy of the mobs? Never mind that the broadcast media – led by CNN – has instilled the bandwagon mentality in the general American psyche to a far greater extent than partisan Internet rantings ever will.

False Martyrdom

For the Left, especially after the narrow escape of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, Jordan's comment (which he tried to retract) seemed to have a ring of truth to it. Was the U.S. military really murderously motivated toward journalists in Iraq? If so, Jordan became in their eyes yet another defender of free media steamrollered by the right-wing machine.

Other critics tried to portray the Eason story as primarily a symptom of red state-blue state antagonisms. "There are those who wish to paint CNN as this liberal media outlet in contrast to Fox and they want to beat up on him for that reason," said David Gergen, a former presidential advisor onstage with Jordan in Davos when the contentious comments were made, on PBS' Newshour. "Frankly, I think that there has been a quality of vigilante justice here which has … been excessive. It's been a cruel fate for Eason Jordan to be caught in effect in the culture wars that are going on in the country."

The characterization of CNN as an overly liberal news outlet is preposterous, but then again so is America today. Just as bizarre is the notion that through his martyrdom Jordan has somehow been imbued with meaning or significance. According to The Nation, "the real controversy here should not be over Jordan's comments. The controversy ought to be over the unconscionable silence in the United States about the military's repeated killing of journalists in Iraq."

A Question of Image

Not exactly. The real controversy here is the huge role media outlets such as Jordan's have had and continue to have in feeding the war machine. The U.S. might or might not be targeting reporters, but the issue would never have arisen had America not been fighting so many wars in the first place – a phenomenon that would have been impossible without the active complicity of the media.

Further, it is disingenuous in the extreme to imagine Eason Jordan as somehow a champion of free journalism. After all, as we will see, he himself had helped set the precedent for embedding journalists in the U.S. military, during the Kosovo war of 1999.

In his resignation, Eason Jordan himself betrayed the real significance of the whole affair. According to ABC, he decided to quit "to avoid CNN being 'unfairly tarnished' by the controversy." In other words, when it comes down to it, the whole affair was a question neither of factual verisimilitude nor of patriotism but one of image. And in terms of creating the kind of image that allows for modern warfare, CNN paved the way. From the first Gulf War's nighttime footage of U.S. bombardment, which made war seem like a video game, right through to the human interest refugee stories that defined the Kosovo war, CNN has worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. military to create images that would, taken together, justify and popularize the American war effort. In the end, Jordan became a casualty of his own success.

However, while we should shed no tears for his downfall, it is sad to see him go out this way, for it leaves the most important things concealed. It's as if Rummy was fired after being found to have a predilection for prancing around in little pink tutus, instead of for causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands. There is something deeply dissatisfying about the martyrdom of Eason Jordan, in that it conceals the deep complicity he had in fueling wars. But the leviathan surfaces in its bigger and arguably proper context when we consider his complicity in the Kosovo war.

"Dumbing It Down": CNN Policy, as Stated by Jordan

At the time of his resignation, Jordan was no longer serving as CNN's president for global news-gathering, though he remained "CNN's chief fix-it man overseas, arranging coverage in dangerous or hard-to-reach parts of the world." However, during the Kosovo war, he was fully in control of operations and in fact bragged about his network's technology, methods, and goals in an April 1, 1999 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. After lavishing praise on the network for its modern computer and camera technology, Jordan spoke frankly about the importance of dumbing it down for mass consumption: "[W]e want to make it simple to understand and as easy as possible to understand."

Indeed, there's nothing worse than alienating the average viewer by presuming too much intelligence. The CNN method thus involved video-game footage of bombing and heartbreaking pictures of crying refugees combined with, as Jordan puts it, "five- and six-word bullet points to help explain the story so that people can better understand it at home."

It gets worse. It's more than just the numbing repetition of images and dumbed-down news. The fact is that under Eason Jordan's watch, CNN violated almost every principal held to be sacrosanct for journalism, willfully and with the single goal of selling Bill Clinton's war on Serbia. These transgressions went from psycho-historical manipulation to concocting stories, fabricating images, and uncritically repeating administration propaganda, all the way through to serious conflict-of-interest relationships between the network and government/military personnel. The fact that these are all supported by facts bodes ill for Jordan – though he probably won't have to answer for it until he gets off the elevator at the seventh floor of Woody Allen's hell.

New Hague Testimony Bolsters the Case for CNN's Fraud

In recent witness testimony at the Hague (unsurprisingly, ignored by CNN), three Macedonian medics who worked in 1999 at the Kosovo border refugee singled out Eason Jordan's CNN for being the most intellectually corrupt and deceptive news agency of all those present during the conflict.

Whereas the network (and most of the other foreign press) declared that the Albanian refugees had been driven out of Kosovo by vengeful Serbs, robbed and beaten along the way, only to die in squalor across the Macedonian border, three men who worked day in and day out at the camps – the head of Macedonia's emergency medical services, Dr. Dobre Aleksovski; Goran Stojcic, a driver who worked for the emergency services; and medic Mirko Babic – claimed that the truth was somewhat different. While hundreds of thousands passed through the camps, only 14 had serious injuries: "[O]ne woman cut her finger on a tin can, and some other people slipped and fell on the wet ground, sustaining injuries such as broken bones and twisted ankles; there were also a couple of pregnant women who were sent to the hospital to give birth." (Contrast that with NATO Spokesman Jamie Shea's absurd claim that 100,000 babies were born in the refugee camps).

Further, unlike what most Western media reports stated, the refugees had money, cigarettes, telephones, and some, even guns. According to Dr. Aleksovski's testimony, "the Albanians refused to eat bread that was baked in Skopje. They would only eat bread from [the Albanian-majority city of] Tetovo. Whereas normal refugees would have been grateful for any food they got."

The "CNN Factor" at Work

According to the witnesses, the war-hungry media – led by CNN – turned the refugee camps into a three-ring circus of simulation and journalistic fraud. For his part, Mr. Stojcic "witnessed a CNN camera crew coaching refugees on how to act for the cameras. He eyewitnessed a man cross the border with two children. CNN spoke to the man and sent him back to cross the border so that he could cross again in front of the camera; the second time the man crossed over he had his children crying for the cameras."

Further, Mr. Stojcic "witnessed a group of refugees throwing a child into the mud; a CNN camera crew then filmed the child after it was crying and covered in mud. The witness identified Christiane Amanpour as the CNN reporter who was on the spot in the refugee camps. He said that CNN was the worst media outlet, as it was the most prone to staging scenes for its news broadcasts."

This testimony was supported by the medic, Mirko Babic, who "witnessed a CNN camera crew staging a phony exodus of refugees over a hill. A large group of refugees were gathered together and the camera crew filmed them coming over a muddy hill. The camera crew recruited elderly people and small children to be part of this group. The camera crew separated the children from their parents and then paired them up with the old people who the children did not know. The result was that the children would cry. The CNN crew even went so far as to instruct the old people to pull out their handkerchiefs and act like they were crying too."

According to Babic, CNN and the BBC were the media bodies most prone to "rigging false news footage."

Unfortunately for him, Hague Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice tried to rebut these charges by recourse to old CNN footage that "claimed that eight Albanians had died in the camps for want of medical treatment in one day alone." He could just as well have mentioned the April 6, 1999 CNN report that claimed, without naming sources, that 50 helpless refugees had died. However, according to both medic Babic and Dr. Aleksovski, "only one refugee died in the camps the whole time, and not due to lack of medical care. CNN had lied when it reported that eight refugees died in one day."

For the mainstream media, however, all that's worthy of note here is that the refugee angle "was used to great effect in Kosovo."

Conflicts of Interest, From Amanpour to the Psy-Ops Crew

These shenanigans allowed the vital creation of woeful, heartbreaking images for the viewer back home who might otherwise question the rationale behind war. But above and beyond the work carried out by CNN's hacks in the field, by any reasonable standard the network was guilty on a much higher level of gross conflict of interest, in that its top war correspondent (the aforementioned Ms. Amanpour) was the wife of the State Department's spokesman and official liaison to the KLA at Rambouillet, James Rubin. As Rubin himself put it when imploring budding diplomats toward public service at a Columbia graduation speech on May 19, 1999, "cynicism … is simply not an option." Indeed.

Even had Amanpour not been merely the faithful mouthpiece for the U.S., NATO, and the KLA (which she was), the simple fact that she was truly embedded with one of the parties involved with the war should have prevented her from being allowed to take part in covering it. Nevertheless, for the media establishment and the Peabody Awards, where the CNN gang had been just two days before the Columbia event, award-winner Amanpour represents "all that is good and great in television journalism."

That such conflicts of interest might matter little to the likes of Eason Jordan is attested by an even more blatant connection between CNN and the government's war machine in Kosovo. In a Counterpunch article of March 26, 2000, Alexander Cockburn recounts having received "an angry phone call from Eason Jordan" following his report about how U.S. Army Psy-Ops personnel had been working in CNN's Atlanta headquarters during the Kosovo war, "helping" in "the production of news," according to a U.S. Army Major quoted. However, despite being "full of indignation that [Cockburn] had somehow compromised the reputation of CNN," Jordan admitted that the story was true – though, like the Amanpour conflict, it apparently mattered little to him.

A further telling detail, in light of the recent scandal, is the fact that Eason and CNN had received advance warning from the military about the impending bombing of the Radio Television Serbia building by NATO. Jordan claimed that "CNN used the knowledge to warn off the planned bombing, as journalists from the U.S. and elsewhere would have been in the building at the time." However, "days later, when the Western journalists had gone, the U.S. bombing went ahead, killing 16 Serb journalists."

It All Comes Full Circle

In Iraq, the only journalists safe from American arms are embedded ones. At least that's the thinking of people such as Sgrena – and, possibly, of Eason Jordan himself. Whether or not this is true, it is undeniable that since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has slowly but surely eradicated the freedoms traditionally enjoyed by independent journalists in war zones, arguing that it cannot guarantee the safety of those who elect to strike off on their own rather than remain within the ranks of the embedded. In other words: enlist or face the consequences.

The wicked irony of all this is that the Bush administration hit on embedding as a means of ensuring positive coverage only after Eason Jordan's CNN had pioneered (if in an embryonic form) the practice during Kosovo. For example, Jordan himself states in the April 1, 1999 Australian interview that "we had a correspondent yesterday who flew on a B-52 bomber out of England to a bomb location just out of Yugoslavia, and he was allowed to fly on that plane only by himself along with the flight crew…."

"I have devoted my professional life to helping make CNN the most trusted and respected news outlet in the world," said Eason in penning his own eulogy, "and I would never do anything to compromise my work or that of the thousands of talented people it is my honor to work alongside."

Unfortunately, he already has. And it didn't take a verbal faux pas at Davos to reveal how.

Eason Jordan's true failings