Questioning CNN

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted March 13, 2006.

Rory O'Connor has sent this list of questions to CNN president Jonathan Klein in lieu of their scheduled interview. AlterNet will be publishing Klein's responses, but in the meantime, if you have additional questions relating to CNN's war coverage, send them to QuestionCNN@AlterNet.org.

1. Editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post have apologized for their Iraq war coverage and admitted it was not critical enough, thus acknowledging that their institutions made mistakes in coverage. So have such broadcast network news presidents as ABC's David Westin and Andrew Heyward, your former boss at CBS. Isn't it time for cable networks such as your own to offer a public reappraisal of the war coverage? If CNN does so, what form will it take? How do you as CNN's chief assess the network's coverage of the runup to the war, and the war itself? What would you have done differently?

2. Many viewers found a gap between the coverage of CNN International and the domestic channel, and complain that the U.S. channel was guilty of more jingoism. Even Wolf Blitzer seemed to admit as much. True?

3. CNN's own correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, was critical of the network for not asking enough questions about WMD. She attributed it to the competition for ratings with Fox, which had an inside track to top administration officials. Do you agree? Did you ever speak with Amanpour about her charges, and how to correct the situation?

4. This week the anti-war movement will make an issue of the media coverage of the war, with protests at many major media outlets. Critics say that CNN and other mainstream outlets generally offer more selling than telling, and more jingoism than journalism. How do you react?

5. These are the same groups that helped turn out 30 million people worldwide Feb. 15, 2003, in the greatest one-day protest in history to try to stop a war. The media marginalized those protests, however. 300,000 anti-war protesters here in New York City, for example, were given equal treatment on CNN with pro-invasion supporters who numbered only in the hundreds. Anti-war protesters charge the public was deceived by the coverage. Were they correct?

6. Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas recently wrote, "Nothing is more troubling … than the obsequious press during the runup to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out -- no questions asked." Do you agree? If so, what steps will you take to ensure that CNN at least does not repeat this mistake?

7. Thomas and others contend, "The naive complicity of the press and the government was never more pronounced than in the prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The media became an echo chamber for White House pronouncements." Two of the nation's most prestigious newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, kept up a drumbeat for war with Iraq to bring down dictator Saddam Hussein -- and television news outlets such as CNN were no different, accepting almost unquestioningly bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction and the dubious White House rationale that proved to be so costly on a human scale, not to mention a drain on the Treasury. When Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his statement on Saddam's lethal arsenal on Feb. 5, 2003, before the United Nations, CNN and other mainstream media outlets said he left little question that Hussein had tried to conceal weapons of mass destruction. Why? And why did CNN not say nearly as much about the subsequent failure to find any such weapons?

8. Do you agree with Helen Thomas that it is now "past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they may"?

9. At best, the mainstream media were extremely gullible in accepting the Bush administration's false claims. Why? Did executives at places like CNN really think it was all going to be so easy, a "cakewalk?" Why did the Washington press corps forgo its traditional skepticism to become cheerleaders for a deceptive administration? Careerism? Ratings hunger? Why did so few stand alone outside Washington's pack journalism?

This and other articles by Rory O'Connor are available on his blog.

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