In recent months, journalist Christina Davidson has written dozens of articles for IraqSlogger, which calls itself “the world’s premier Iraq-focused website.” She covers a range of topics with apparent professionalism. But days ago, she worked on an article that put her in a bit of an awkward position — writing about a new documentary that criticizes her boss.
The film — “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” — is based on my book of the same name. And I appear in the movie, speaking about various aspects of war propaganda and news media. So I can’t claim to be a disinterested bystander.
Davidson’s piece showed that she understands some key dynamics the film addresses. “The US media’s uncritical reporting on the Bush administration’s reasons for seeking conflict in Iraq has sparked soul-searching and embarrassment in many American newsrooms,” she noted, “as journalists struggle to understand how the fourth estate could have so thoroughly failed in its duty to hold government machinations up to the highest level of scrutiny.”
And Davidson wrote that the movie goes beyond “well-covered terrain” by placing the inquiry “in a historical context that illuminates the manner in which the US government has long ‘sold’ military operations to the public.”
But one thing about the “War Made Easy” film bothered her. “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.”
Davidson added that “Solomon sees a willing ally to the Pentagon because (Jordan) sought an opinion on the retired military officers the network planned to use as expert commentators. Solomon assumes that Jordan was seeking the blessing of Pentagon officials on the propriety of his choices, when in fact he was just doing a boss’s duty.”
And Davidson quoted an explanation from her boss Eason Jordan: “Employers routinely vet prospective employees with their previous employers. In these cases, we vetted retired generals to ensure they were experts in specific military and geographic areas. The generals were not vetted for political views.”
The explanation can only flunk the laugh test.
Eason Jordan was CNN’s chief news executive when, on April 20, 2003 — about four weeks after US troops led invading forces into Iraq — he appeared on CNN and revealed that he had gotten the Defense Department’s approval on which retired high-ranking officers to put on the network’s payroll.
“I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance — ‘At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’ — and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”
With war euphoria riding high soon after Saddam’s fall, Jordan was trying to burnish his — and CNN’s — credentials with the boast that he had been playing ball with the nation’s military commanders. Now, Jordan is trying to spin his behavior with the claim that he was merely checking job references.
“Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting,” I comment in the documentary. “But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it.”
What Jordan did on behalf of CNN “wasn’t even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on its own network, ‘See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.’ And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press. And that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the US is involved in a war based on lies.”
Part of that avoidance occurs when journalists feel compelled to defend the boss.
— The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same title.
