The best reporter by far on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq unloads a devastating barrage against his fellow hacks in Editor and Publisher. The New York Times’ John F. Burns reveals just how compromised and corrupt so many journalists were in Iraq, how willing they were to hide the atrocities of the regime, how their own self-interest trumped the truth:
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that [Saddam’s Iraq] was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
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.
Who was that reporter? Why won’t Burns name him? If you still harbor doubts about the overwhelming moral case for the liberation of Iraq, you need to read this interview. It’s devastating about the mainstream media in the U.S., let alone mouthpieces for tyranny like the BBC:
Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It’s not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they’re actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it’s extremely revealing… I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It’s not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: “The universal spirit of sport,” “My esteemed colleague.” The world chose in the main to ignore this.
Of course they did. But they won’t ignore even a single guerrilla attack on coalition forces, will they? (Bonus point: leftist media blogger, James Romenesko, buries Burns’ piece and gives it the headline: “I was the most unfavored of all war correspondents.” He leads on the Bush administration’s alleged spinning. Figures, doesn’t it?)
The Dish 