Democracy Now! interviews a professor who felt CNN and the NYT shied away from the connections between the United States and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was hanged early Saturday in Baghdad.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to turn now to Professor John Collins at St. Lawrence University, Upstate New York, who wrote a piece for Electronic Iraq called “The Low Profile: CNN and New York Times Execute a Denial of History.” Welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHN COLLINS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you evaluate the media coverage of the execution of Saddam Hussein here in the United States?
JOHN COLLINS: Sure. Certainly CNN, I think, needs to get some attention here. I turned on CNN's broadcast on the night of the execution, as I’m sure a lot of people did, and I was immediately struck by the fact that the whole event was being very carefully framed in order to kind of facilitate a denial of the historical relationship between Saddam Hussein and the US government.
The entire focus of the broadcast -- and this was the Anderson Cooper program on CNN -- the entire focus was on Saddam Hussein as an individual, and the images that were being looped on the screen, sort of over Anderson Cooper's voice and the voices of the guests, were obviously selected for their value in pushing that storyline forward. So, we saw, for example, images of Saddam Hussein brandishing a sword, firing a gun, laughing sort of like a cartoon villain, being checked for lice by US military doctors, and so forth.
And for me, the most obvious absence there was the photo and the video of this Donald Rumsfeld visit to Saddam in December 1983, at a time when the US government was working very hard to strengthen its ties with Baghdad. And that image of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein is not a random image. It’s a very crucial piece of the history of that regime, a piece that many Americans, I think, may not be aware of. And it’s all the more important given Rumsfeld's subsequent and current role during the current Bush administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Professor Collins, I think it was CNN that was one of the first to show that videotape on air, the actual videotape in 1983-1984 of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, and questioning Rumsfeld about it.
JOHN COLLINS: Right. And that’s why it’s all the more so strange to me that CNN would have chosen, at this point, at the moment of the execution, to frame the issue in a way that shielded its viewers in that moment from any reference to past US support for Saddam and his actions.
And I think we saw a little bit something kind of similar in the New York Times the following morning in the front-page obituary in the Times, which was a long piece, over 5,000 words, and it certainly did a better job than CNN, in terms of providing some historical context. It did mention briefly that the US chose to back Iraq in its war with Iran during the 1980s. But the vast majority of the obituary portrayed the US as a consistent opponent of Saddam, which is to say that it leaned heavily toward the post-1990 piece of the story.
And I think what we have to keep in mind here is that the history of this regime is a long and complicated history, like anything in international politics. It’s built on a web of relationships, which bring with them webs of responsibility. And I think that, as Americans, we have an ethical responsibility to confront the role that we’ve played in that story, and certainly the news media have a responsibility to give us as detailed a history as possible, so that we can make informed decisions about policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor John Collins, you also write about New York Times coverage of Saddam Hussein's reign.
JOHN COLLINS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that?
JOHN COLLINS: Absolutely. I mean, I think the obituary on the front page was particularly noteworthy, because it played on a lot of the kinds of, I guess, stereotypes that we’ve become very used to when America's enemies are discussed in the mainstream media. So there were lots of anecdotes in the Times obituary about Saddam's paranoia, his megalomania, his sadism, and so forth. And I think the overall effect of that piece was to confirm to the readers of the Times that, yes, this man really was evil. But that just raises the question of why we ever allied ourselves with him to begin with. And the Times could have done a much better job of exploring that issue at the moment of his execution.