The Low Profile: CNN and the New York Times Execute a
Denial of History
by John Collins

An existential question: If journalism is the first
draft of history, then what is journalism that denies
history? Is it still journalism?

The question came to mind Friday night as CNN's
Anderson Cooper led Americans through the initial
moments following the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Conveniently carried out just five minutes past the
hour when "Anderson Cooper 360" goes on the air, the
execution provided an opportunity for viewers to think
about the long story of the Iraqi leader's brutal
reign. Yet when it came to informing the audience
about one key aspect of that history - the role of the
United States in helping to create and maintain the
"butcher of Baghdad" - CNN offered only amnesia.

Throughout the CNN broadcast, as news gradually
trickled in concerning the details of the execution,
viewers were treated to a highly selective loop of
stock images of the condemned: Saddam brandishing a
tribal sword offered as a gift by one of his fawning
subjects, Saddam firing a gun, Saddam laughing his
cartoonish dictator laugh, Saddam defiantly reading a
statement at the start of the U.S. invasion in 2003,
Saddam smoking a cigar, Saddam being checked for lice
by U.S. military doctors, Saddam wildly gesturing
during his recent trial.

And the photo of Saddam shaking hands with U.S. envoy
Donald Rumsfeld back in December 1983? Absent. With
the inevitable headline ("Death of a Dictator")
already in place, the storyline was set. This was to
be about Saddam facing "justice" for crimes that he
alone committed. The U.S. presence in the story was to
be, at most, a ghostly one limited to providing legal
and moral guidance from behind the scenes. As if to
confirm this paternalistic and self-serving fiction,
CNN's Elaine Quijano dutifully reported from Waco that
President Bush, not wanting to appear that he was
"gloating" over the final humiliation of the Iraqi
leader, was keeping a low profile.

Viewers who were dissatisfied with "Anderson Cooper
360" might have found themselves turning to the New
York Times for a better sense of perspective. Yet
while yesterday's obituary in the Times was impressive
for its length (over 5000 words), it provided little
more in terms of historical context.

Rather than offering readers a responsible assessment
of their own government's role in the life and crimes
of the Iraqi leader, author Neil MacFarquhar elected
to repeat the kind of sensational details Americans
have come to expect when the country's designated
enemies are profiled: Saddam as megalomaniac (he
believed "he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever"
and possessed "boundless egotism and self-delusion"),
Saddam as Mafioso (the "Corleone-like feuds" of his
family "became the stuff of gory public soap operas"),
Saddam as traumatized child ("persistent stories
suggest that Mr. Hussein's stepfather delighted in
humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep"),
Saddam as sadistic murderer (while reading the names
of Baath party officials allegedly involved in a
supposed coup plot, "Mr. Hussein paused from reading
occasionally to light his cigar, while the room
erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death
to traitors"), Saddam as narcissist ("He dyed his hair
black and refused to wear his reading glasses in
public, according to interviews with exiles"), Saddam
as paranoid ("Delicacies like imported lobster were
first dispatched to nuclear scientists to be tested
for radiation and poison"), and on and on.

And the inconvenient history of U.S. support for the
man now being mentioned in the same breath as Hitler,
Stalin and Pol Pot? Aside from a single reference to
the U.S. decision to back Iraq in its war with Iran,
the obituary is silent.

All other references to the U.S. cover events from
1990 onwards. The choice of verbs tells it all:
Saddam, his regime, and his country are variously
described as being "toppled," "routed," "penetrated,"
and "expelled" by U.S. military might. One has to look
to the bloggers, muckrakers and scholars to find the
verbs that tell the rest of the story: "installed,"
"provided," "enabled," "encouraged," and "sold."

Reading and watching the kind of mainstream coverage
provided by CNN and the New York Times during the last
48 hours, one could be forgiven for believing that the
relationship between Saddam and the U.S. had always
been one of enmity and violence. Yet as Juan Cole and
others have tirelessly pointed out, the U.S.
government began "enabling" Saddam as early as 1959
when the CIA enlisted his help in undermining the
government of Abdul Karim Qasim.

The cozy relationship, which it now appears included
U.S. support for the coup that put Saddam in power in
1968, continued into the 1980s. The infamous Rumsfeld
visit symbolized the U.S. policy of providing military
and diplomatic assistance to the Iraqi regime in its
catastrophic war with Iran. Cole points out that
Secretary of State George Shultz even went so far as
to shield Saddam from a possible UN condemnation for
Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran.

At a time when the airwaves are filled with pious
reminders of the need to "remember the victims" of
Saddam's brutality, how are we to read the systematic
absence of references to the U.S. role in helping to
produce these and other victims? It seems that while
President Bush was keeping a "low profile" in Waco,
the corporate media were safely ensconced in a bunker
of amnesia. Indeed, "low profile" is an apt
description for the way that the corporate media
continue to treat the scandalous history of U.S.
support for repressive regimes across the globe.

In his enormously useful book States of Denial (Polity
Press, 2001), Stanley Cohen argues that most denial
can be divided into three categories: literal denial
("it did not happen"), interpretive denial ("it
happened, but it's not what it looks like"), and
implicatory denial ("it happened, and it is what it
looks like, but there's nothing wrong with it"). In
other words, we tend to deny either the facts, the
interpretation of the facts, and/or the moral
implications of the facts.

In the rush to celebrate the death of the "butcher of
Baghdad," we are up to our necks in all three types of
denial. The failure to provide a full account of this
horrifying chapter of Iraqi and American history is,
to be sure, an act of literal denial. If two leaders
shake hands, but the photo is not shown on CNN, did
they really shake hands? One is reminded of the
oft-quoted statement by an anonymous New York Times
staff member: "If the Times wasn't there, it didn't
happen."

Of course, the facts about the U.S. role in Saddam's
brutality are not always literally denied, and this is
where the second and third types of denial come into
play. No doubt in the coming days we will hear
numerous commentators attempt to "spin" the facts, as
has often happened in discussions of U.S. ambassador
April Glaspie's famous "green light" to Saddam just
before Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It wasn't
really a green light, we'll be told. Yes, it was a
handshake, but that doesn't mean it was an endorsement
of Saddam's policies.

The boldest (and, one must add, the most honest)
defenders of U.S. policy will employ the language of
implicatory denial, insisting, when pressed, that U.S.
support for Saddam was justified under the
circumstances. We'll be told that the realities of the
Cold War, or the struggle against the threat posted by
the Iranian revolution, or the need for maintaining
U.S. access to cheap fossil fuels, created a context
in which the U.S. had no choice but to get its hands
dirty.

In this light, it seems that the initial coverage of
Saddam's execution has served as a collective ritual
hand-washing designed to reassure Americans that they
really are the blameless leaders of a cosmic struggle
against "evil." And so the answer to the existential
question comes into view. Today's mainstream
journalism, even "live" TV, is a far cry from the
first draft of history. Instead, it functions largely
as a transmission of selective history that has been
drafted--and airbrushed, and sanitized, and
rearranged, and distorted--long before it ever reaches
our eyes and ears.

John Collins is Associate Professor of Global Studies
at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is the
author of Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation
and the Palestinian State of Emergency (NYU Press,
2004) and the co-editor of Collateral Language: A
User's Guide to America's New War (NYU Press, 2002).

Copyright © 2006 John Collins