Last Friday, The New York Times published an op-ed by Eason Jordan of CNN called “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” Since then a firestorm of criticism has erupted over CNN’s flawed coverage of what’s been going on in Iraq.

(A related article about journalists in Iraq is located here. More here, here and here.)

Right-wing pundits especially have been giving Mr. Jordan a hard time since his NYT confession made the headlines. Yesterday Jason Kottke rebutted their criticism with this:

Lastly, where the hell was everyone else in Iraq, reporting all these atrocities? Where was FoxNews endangering the lives of their Iraqi employees’ families to get the truth out at all costs? Where was Rush Limbaugh sticking his neck out to topple Saddam’s regime with the truth? Out of your chairs, pundits. It’s hard to make the tough choices when you’re sitting comfortably on the sidelines. Could you make a decision to air a news report knowing that it will directly cause the brutal torture and death of someone’s entire family?

Put that way, I suppose folks like Rush Limbaugh should be taken to task for being “chickenhawks.” But as it was reported by Franklin Foer here, how the heck could the journos report anything truthful when they were shadowed by those infamous minders from the Iraqi regime? If CNN was willing to cope with the minders and give way to their demands, what does that say about the price they were willing to pay for continued access?

Visas are the Ministry of Information’s primary tools for controlling foreign journalists. Even correspondents for CNN and the BBC, which maintain permanent offices in Baghdad, must continually apply for visas, which typically last only two weeks. And without visas for their own correspondents, the networks have to rely on local Iraqis to keep their offices running–locals who are even more subject to government reprisals than are visiting Americans.

Journalism ethics are always changing, depending on the situation one has to handle; they don’t seem set in stone, but once something questionable comes up, there are always basic tenets that one should be reminded of.

Media organizations like FOXNews didn’t have the same arrangement CNN did, nor did they care to maintain one. Why? I think they weren’t willing to sacrifice their integrity to hide the truth. Journos who didn’t quote the Baathist Party line were kicked out of Baghdad and out of Iraq, sometimes permanently. If you ask me, a one-time-only visit in-country would be worth more than “permanent” access to a situation at the price of one’s credibility.