How wonderfully appropriate that the public discovery of the most serious media scandal to come out of the war in Iraq should have been made by one of its authors—and in a statement which he himself obviously supposed was an occasion for self-congratulation rather than shame. Eason Jordan, the chief news executive of CNN, at least lost no time. Two days after the fall of Baghdad, he published an op ed in The New York Times disclosing that the network had concealed what it knew of the crimes of Saddam Hussein, some of which had been committed against its own employees. Naturally it also failed to disclose to viewers that such news as it was bringing them from Iraq had been purchased at the cost of its willingness to keep quiet about this much more newsworthy news.

Jordan wrote that these “awful things” could not be reported “because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.” But of course it was only journalistic self-importance which made the existence of CNN’s “Baghdad staff” into a datum of any moral significance. There was always the honorable option of closing the Baghdad bureau and reporting the truth from somewhere else. But as Jordan told Franklin Foer of The New Republiclast autumn, the network’s pride in its comprehensiveness was at stake and its Baghdad presence of overriding importance, “First, because it’s newsworthy; second, because there’s an expectation that if anybody is in