CNN Admits to Being Used by Hezbo

I've decided to join Rush in calling Hezbollah "Hezbo". It's much easier to remember, and given there are 5 or 6 different spellings for the organization, mine is as good as anyone else's.

On July 19th I referenced a CNN report that I had seen which was little more than a propaganda piece for Hezbo. I was surprised that CNN ran it without any disclaimer whatsoever regarding the sites they visited, and the restrictions on their coverage. CNN has taken no small amount of heat for that report.

Now CNN is fessing up (from Newsbusters):

Back on July 18, Hezbollah took Robertson and his crew on a tour of a heavily damaged south Beirut neighborhood. The Hezbollah “press officer” even instructed the CNN camera: “Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?”

In his original story, Robertson had no complaints about the journalistic limitations of a story put together under such tight controls, and Robertson himself at one point seemed to agree with the Hezbollah propaganda claim that Israeli jets had targeted a civilian area: “As we run past the rubble, we see much that points to civilian life, no evidence apparent of military equipment.”

Challenged by Reliable Sources host (and Washington Post media writer) Howard Kurtz on Sunday, Robertson suggested Hezbollah has “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations,” that the terrorist group “had control of the situation. They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath,” and he even contradicted Hezbollah’s self-serving spin: “There’s no doubt that the [Israeli] bombs there are hitting Hezbollah facilities.”

But the closest Robertson came to making any of these points in the taped package that aired last week was admitting that “we [he and his CNN crew] didn’t go burrowing into all the houses,” after pointing out (for the second time) that “we didn’t see any military type of equipment” in the area Hezbollah chose to let them tour.

CNN got snookered by Hezbo and didn't have the courage to challenge them or at least provide a disclaimer on the report. This is sort of reminiscent of the admission by former CNN head Eason Jordan that they purposely ignored Saddam Hussein's brutality in order to keep from losing their bureau in Baghdad.

As Dan Rather would say...courage.