Journal: News & Comment

Why were they there?

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CNN's coverage of the war in Iraq has been pretty obviously sanitized, even if you haven't been monitoring Al Jazeera or other news organizations with different biases.

But the revelation that CNN kept monstrous secrets in order not to annoy Saddam Hussein and his government in the years before the war—so that the network was allowed to maintain a Baghdad bureau—is pretty disturbing. Not only has recent coverage been skewed, perhaps inevitably, toward the U.S. military, but previous coverage was skewed toward Hussein and the Baath party. So CNN's only common journalistic ground has been a sort of inoffensive (or offensive, looked at another way) journalistic muddy middle.

What exactly was the point of CNN's being in Iraq for all these years? Just bragging rights?

UPDATE: On the other hand...

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