In journalism, stories are currency. They're what journalists produce, what they're paid for, what they're judged by. A scoop can make a career; getting scooped can destroy one. No wonder then that journalists chase stories with the single-minded tenacity of race dogs chasing the mechanical rabbit.
For a nation of news consumers, this is usually a good thing. Tenacious journalists will break down stonewalls and tear through cover-ups in pursuit of a story. Aggressive journalism is one of the public's best and last protections against deception. But there are times when journalists become so fixated on churning out stories, so bent on looking like they're on top of the news, that they take the offered deceptions. Sometimes journalists must choose between a "story" -- and the sources that parcel those "stories" out, like Christmas gifts for nice reporters -- and the truth. Recent revelations show that, for a full decade, too many reporters in Iraq made the wrong choice. The facts are disturbing, and should provide a wake-up call for the media.
Last week reporter John F. Burns -- a two-time Pulitzer prize winner and Iraq correspondent for "The New York Times" -- gave an interview in "Editor & Publisher" about the all-too-cozy relationship between many Western journalists and Saddam Hussein's bloody regime. Burns reported for years on Hussein's atrocities -- "Saddam had turned this country into a slaughterhouse," he said. But much of the Western press, under pressure from the Iraqi government, turned a blind eye to the slaughter in order to stay in-favor with Iraqi officials and allowed to remain in the country: "The essential truth [went] untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay."
According to Burns, some reporters went further than just suppressing nasty details about Saddam's regime. They courted sources -- especially the Iraqi minister of information -- by "taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror." One reporter, anxious to prove what a good trooper he'd been, allegedly gave the information minister printed copies of other reporters' stories, to show how much more critical they were than his own. Some of the stories in question had been written by Burns; later, Iraqi agents went to Burns' hotel, seized his equipment, threatened him with arrest and accused him of working for the CIA.
Burns' revelations mirror those made back in April by Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive. Jordan, writing in "The New York Times," confessed that CNN hadn't reported on Iraqi atrocities because the network didn't want to lose its coveted Baghdad bureau. For the first time in years, Jordan revealed the true story from inside Iraq: the story of journalists who "disappeared" after criticizing Hussein, the story of an imprisoned Kuwaiti woman whose dismembered corpse was delivered to the door of her family's home, the story of how one man was forced to send a letter of thanks to Hussein for executing the man's brother. Instead, CNN reported on Saddam's "election" with 100 percent of the vote.
Somewhere along the line, filing stories became more important than reporting the truth in Iraq. In order to keep their Baghdad datelines, journalists climbed into bed with a mass murderer, turning a blind eye to the slaughter around them. The result is that a decade's worth of coverage now appears tainted. Furthermore, the deception in Iraq casts a shadow over current reporting from other totalitarian states -- China, Cuba and Iran, to name a relevant few -- where reporters may also be tempted to clean up the news in order to curry favor with their government handlers. Maybe it's not surprising that CNN's Havana bureau hasn't had many bad things to say about Fidel Castro. Maybe they need a wake-up call, a reminder that it's not worth chasing stories if the truth is a casualty.
Well, the wake-up call is here. Now we can only hope that journalists hear it.
