Deal with the Devil? -

Deal with the Devil? - I rip on Ellen Goodman a lot. She usually has it coming.

She actually has a fairly good piece in the Strib (and probably the Boston Glob) today, though, on the Eason Jordon flap.

She starts:

It isn't every day that a journalist kicks up a furor over the stories that he didn't report.

That's what happened when Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by telling prewar tales that never made it on the air. There was an Iraqi cameraman who'd been abducted and tortured. There was an aide to Saddam Hussein's son who had his front teeth ripped out with pliers.

These were, Jordan wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, "awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

So far, so good. She notes the compromises that usually attend wartime journalism

Just a week before Jordan released "these stories bottled up inside me," someone asked a CNN spokeswoman why the network rarely showed injuries or blood or soldiers killed. She replied, "It's a news judgment where we would of course be mindful of the sensibilities of our viewers."

Isn't this also a deal with the devil, a decision to edit the hell out of war? Aren't we also jeopardizing lives by not telling the essence of war itself?

Fair enough. We don't report war in all its grisly truth in the US. European newspapers and news media tend to report more of it - but, given the overt (and honestly stated) political biases of European news media, the "honesty" will tend to have a political motive.

But for whatever reason, yes - we do censor blood and gore in American war reportage, for the most part. As Goodman notes:

I've been reading Chris Hedges' unflinching look at war and its correspondents, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." Hedges is a sort of recovering war correspondent whose bylines stretched from El Salvador to the Persian Gulf War. He writes of war as "a drug, one I ingested for many years."

About himself and other war correspondents, he says that "the lie in war is almost always the lie of omission." Included on the list of omissions are the blunders of generals, the murders of civilians; "the horror of wounds are rarely disclosed."

Very true. For better or worse, that's how US media cover war, or at least combat.

Goodman continues - and surprises me just a bit in the process:

I am not a pacifist. I share Hedges' view: "The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison -- just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live."

But how do we know, really know, that war is a poison rather than a tasty elixir of patriotism and pride and triumph? The question is left behind on all battlefields by the stories that aren't told.

The point being that as a war corresondent (or an editor working with them), you leave things out, the things that are just too horrible to report to the folks back home. Fair enough.

But remember what the column is about. Despite its foray into the life and ethics of the war correspondent, the article started with a reference to Eason Jordan and CNN. And Jordan wasn't dropping the gory details of a firefight - a decision one makes in a moment and moves on, much like the firefight itself. He was relating a decision made in a boardroom among CNN executives over the course of more than a decade.

This isn't a war story that remains untold. It is a corporate compromise with ethics.

Posted by Mitch at April 17, 2003 09:58 AM