Backspin for War: CNN Guilty of Caving to the Pentagon?

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet. Posted August 16, 2007.

The man who ran CNN's news operation during the invasion of Iraq is now doing damage control in response to a new documentary's evidence that he kowtowed to the Pentagon on behalf of the cable network. His current denial says a lot about how "liberal media" outlets remain deeply embedded in the mindsets of pro-military conformity.

Days ago, the former CNN executive publicly defended himself against a portion of the "War Made Easy" film (based on my book of the same name) that has drawn much comment from viewers since the documentary's release earlier this summer.

As Inter Press Service reported, the movie shows "a news clip of Eason Jordan, a CNN News chief executive who, in an interview with CNN, boasts of the network's cadre of professional 'military experts.' In fact, CNN's retired military generals turned war analysts were so good, Eason said, that they had all been vetted and approved by the U.S. government."

Inter Press called the vetting-and-approval process "shocking" -- and added that "in a country revered for its freedom of speech and unfettered press, Eason's comments would infuriate any veteran reporter who upholds the most basic and important tenet of the journalistic profession: independence."

But Eason Jordan doesn't want us to see it that way. And he has now fired back via an article in IraqSlogger, which calls itself "the world's premier Iraq-focused Web site." Jordan runs that Web site.

The journalist who wrote the Aug. 14 article, Christina Davidson, was in an awkward spot: "War Made Easy" directly criticizes her boss, and it was the subject of the article.

Davidson's only assessment of the film that wasn't favorable had to do with its criticisms of Jordan. "While there's no doubt that journalistic laziness contributed to the uncritical re-broadcasting of the Bush administration's official line," she wrote, "Solomon takes it a little too far in trying to make the case that all of the cable networks were actively complicit in promoting the war. Solomon bases his reasoning primarily on one choice quote from Eason Jordan, former CNN news chief and current CEO of IraqSlogger's parent company, Praedict."

In fact, the film provides a wide range of evidence that "all of the cable networks were actively complicit in promoting the war" -- the result of chronic biases rather than "journalistic laziness."

And CNN, like the rest of the cable news operations, comes in for plenty of tough scrutiny in the documentary. As the magazine Variety noted in a review of "War Made Easy" a few days ago, "Fox News is predictably bashed here, but supposedly neutral CNN gets it even harder."

CNN is among the news outlets at the core of the myth of "the liberal media" -- perpetuated, in part, by the fact that people are often overly impressed by the significance of rhetorical attacks on some media organizations by more conservative outlets. (Before his resignation from CNN in 2005, Eason Jordan was himself subjected to denunciations from the right -- for allegedly skewing news coverage to curry favor with the Baghdad government during Saddam's rule and, after the invasion, for reportedly stating that U.S. troops had targeted some journalists in Iraq.) But antipathy from right-wing pundits is hardly an indication of journalistic independence.

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The new documentary film "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," based on Norman Solomon's book of the same title, is now available on DVD. For information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and and narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

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