Re: Dan Kennedy on Reliable Sources

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

>Dan wrote--
>When you put the
>incident in the context of the other incidents that were not reveled and
>what happened with Collins, it's pretty clear that CNN's bottom line was
>staying in Iraq at all costs.

In the late 30s, the New York Times absolutely knew about the Holocaust but 
held back from reporting it.  So did the BBC.  (A very embarrassing memo 
surfaced years later-- it had said that the story wasn't newsworthy because 
the BBC's audience wouldn't care what was allegedly happening to a bunch of 
European Jews.) The Times held back on the Holocaust story because they 
were afraid of being perceived as "a Jewish newspaper", according to 
several recently written books about the family which owned the Times-- the 
irony there is by the time of the Holocaust, few members of the Ochs family 
were still Jews; most had intermarried or converted.  But still, they 
didn't want to be seen as writing about issues related to the Jews at a 
time when anti-Jewish sentiment was rampant and it might have cost the 
Times some advertisers.  (Btw, I am not making this up; I'd be happy to 
quote the books and interviews from whence this information came.)  Also, a 
number of newspapers were perfectly happy to take advertising money from 
businesses they KNEW were pro-Nazi, and nobody in the mainstream media 
criticised the pro-Nazi sentiments of Charles Lindbergh or Henry Ford, even 
though their sentiments were known.  Could lives have been saved if the 
mainstream media reported about the Holocaust sooner?  I say absolutely 
yes.  But they didn't, and lives weren't saved.  (For a wonderful, but sad, 
article about how most network broadcasters avoided reporting on the 
Holocaust till it was nearly too late, contact me off-list.)

In the early 50s, various news outlets knew about coups in Latin America 
(some led by the U.S. government and business interests, such as in 
Guatemala) but did not report them for fear of offending the hawks who 
claimed to be 'fighting communism'-- in fact, as we all know, many 
newspapers and radio and TV stations silenced themselves about the horrors 
of McCarthy's reign, until Edward R. Murrow took on McCarthy.  And even the 
great Walter Cronkite will admit that he was late in reporting the entire 
story about Viet Nam; at first, by his own admission, he just believed what 
the government was telling him and didn't delve further.

My point is not that any of this is good-- it's not.  But the CNN story is 
just the most recent in a long line of ethical dilemmas networks and 
reporters have faced over the years.  In the ideal universe, everyone would 
make the right decision, but sadly, hindsight is always 20/20, and networks 
do not always do the right thing.   Yes, networks and individual 
journalists should report without fear or favour.  But as we have seen with 
Fox (sorry, Dan, but it's not just CNN that has ethical issues here), whose 
upper management has admitted that it advises the White House (can you say 
"conflict of interests"?) and is often head cheer-leader for any claims the 
White House makes, bias can and does get into the reporting process.  I 
don't know why some conservative outlets are piling on CNN-- they have 
their own share of ethical lapses and who knows what deadly mistakes they 
have made.  I think Dan Kennedy was correct in saying this should be a 
wake-up call for evaluating how we do our jobs and what compromises we are 
willing to make in pursuit of a story.  What I find the most appalling is 
how many colleges have discontinued courses in Media Ethics for their 
Journalism students-- Emerson (where I teach) included.  If we are not at 
least reminding our student journalists of the importance of ethics, we 
shouldn't be shocked and chagrinned years later when all they care about is 
getting the story no matter what.