VIA ANDREW SULLIVAN, here’s a piece on Big Media corruption in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by the New York Times’ John Burns in Editor and Publisher that’s a must-read. This isn’t journalism’s Enron. It’s journalism’s Nuremberg. Or ought to be:

There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.

In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper. . . .

We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn’t recognize it.

This sort of stuff is justified as “getting the story.” But it’s really “going along to get along.” Or being an accomplice to torture and murder.

UPDATE: Reader Kate Steffes emails:

What I don’t understand about this mindset is exactly what kind of “news” are you selling your soul for if once you’ve sold it, you still can’t print any truth? What kind of good is “access” if all you get is lies. I mean, you could get access to lies by just making stuff up in the comfort of your own livingroom and not run the risk of death or disease — with the same effect.

But no Pulitzer.