CNN: Craven News Network

At the end of their online stories on the cartoon culture war, CNN piously states:

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.

Perhaps CNN agrees with the Vatican, which calls for self-censorship when insulting a religion is at issue, though if so, this would be a first for the network:

The Vatican deplored the violence, but said certain provocative forms of criticism were unacceptable. In its first statement on the controversy, the Vatican said: "The right to freedom of thought and expression ... cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers."

It would be interesting to observe if CNN shows this restraint in future, extending the same courtesy to all the major religions.

But perhaps it has more to do with self-interest.

From one Eason Jordan in a piece in the NY Times, at the time chief news executive at CNN, in April of 2003, "The News We Kept to Ourselves":

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.

......Telling the world about the TORTURE would have gotten CNN kicked out of Iraq, and the network would no longer have been able to broadcast fawning interviews with Iraqi leaders, namely Saddam Hussein and his murderous cronies.

But Mr. Jordan nobly suffered agonies of conscience, which he managed to endure until American and allied forces liberated Iraq, with no thanks from CNN at the time or even now:

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

Yes, but without any help from CNN. Given CNN's track record, I think we can question whether what we hear from them is really news:

Here's a statement from Chris Muir, an independent cartoonist (scroll back to the Feb. 3 cartoon).

So I say CNN is the Craven News Network.

And what could be more appropriate---the etymology of the word traces back to Old French.