Piling On CNN

Posted on April 17, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi

Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby has a fairly sane take on the CNN controversy that’s gotten bloggers into a high moral dudgeon these days. The gist is that CNN is not the first news organization cuddle up to fascist bastards in exchange for access and it won’t be the last either. I don’t think CNN necessarily made the best moral choices, but I think the people who are saying “well, they should have simply not reported from Iraq,” or whatever have a smugly naive view of both the nature and business of news gathering. The absence of any other news organization coming forward to admit the same actions does not mean that other news organizations did not indulge in them; I think the folks at CNN deserve at least a measure of credit for coming forward as early as realistically possible to admit to what the organization had done.