Most respected ... ?

This op-ed from top CNN news executive Eason Jordan in today's New York Times (registration required) is absolutely breathtaking in its admission of how far a news organization was willing to go to maintain a presence inside a brutal dictatorship. If true -- and there's no reason to believe it isn't -- CNN refused to report stories of kidnapping, torture and execution in some cases of CNN's own sources just to keep its Baghdad bureau open. So the network was willing to countenance all this ... to produce sanitized, censored, Saddam-approved news?

A principled news organization should years ago have accounted for its people, gotten them to safety, and then pulled out, publicly announcing at every opportunity whey it was doing so. Anything less looks awfully weaselly and cowardly to me.

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