THE NEWS WE KEPT TO OURSELVES:
I asked the State Dept why it considers the CNN report propaganda. Here’s the response:
The following is on background attributable to a State Department spokesperson:
We encourage media outlets to verify information with official U.S. government sources before publication. https://t.co/Vxqysvhl0G
— Michele Kelemen (@michelekelemen) March 5, 2026
Even CNN admits that when it comes to what they broadcast out of Iran, they’re propaganda:
https://twitter.com/NickFondacaro/status/2029776646367002922
“CNN is operating in Iran only with government permission.” https://t.co/oMChqD97G4
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 5, 2026
“Operating only with government permission” — what could possibly go wrong?
Classical reference in headline: CNN Admits Honest Reporting Was Impossible, So Why Go To Baghdad?
Americans debated President Bush’s Iraq policies for months, and one of the key questions was the nature of Saddam’s regime – was the dictator pragmatic enough to genuinely cooperate with U.N. inspectors, or was his regime so thoroughly evil that it could not be reformed, disarmed or contained? It turns out news organizations reporting from Baghdad had lots of information about the true nature of Saddam’s regime, but concealed it from viewers.
Thursday night on CNN’s NewsNight, and in an op-ed, “The News We Kept to Ourselves,” in Friday’s New York Times, the executive in charge of CNN’s worldwide news-gathering operations, Eason Jordan, revealed Saddam’s thugs harassed his staff, imprisoned Iraqi citizens who worked for CNN, and hatched a plot to murder his reporters working in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
“The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services,” he disclosed. “Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways.”
“I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed,” Jordan wrote. He felt CNN could not reveal any of their information without putting lives at risk: “An aide to Uday [Hussein, Saddam’s son] once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliars and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting the boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.”
“I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment,” Jordan concluded. “At last, these stories can be told freely.”
—The Media Research Center, April 11, 2003.