Freedom of Speech, Press, and Expression RIP: Dead in America

CNN censors

By Salama A Salama

You don't expect journalists to be sacked from their jobs for expressing a private opinion, not in a country that is said to be democratic and a champion of freedom worldwide. You don't expect journalists to be punished for voicing their personal feelings, not when they work for news networks that claim to defend freedom of speech. And yet this is exactly what happened to a senior editor with CNN two weeks ago.

The CNN has fired Octavia Nasr, its senior Middle East editor and an award-winning journalist, for voicing sadness over the death of Lebanon's Shia leader Ayatollah Fadlullah. Nasr said in a tweet that she was "sad to hear of the passing of Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlullah... One of Hizbullah's giants I respect a lot..."

Once the tweet was quoted in public, all hell broke loose. According to The New York Times, Israel's supporters protested against the tweet, saying that Fadlullah was a known supporter of Hizbullah, a group listed as terrorist by the US government. Nasr tried to blog her way out of the storm, saying that she respected Fadlullah because of his support for the rights of Lebanese women, but didn't agree with all of his policies. If this was an apology, it didn't satisfy her detractors.

Nasr, it is worth noting here, is a Christian Lebanese. Some of her relatives died in clashes with Hizbullah back home. The view she voiced about Hizbullah was strictly personal. It wasn't published on a CNN site or aired on a CNN programme.

Still, she got the sack. The CNN administration decided that Nasr had stepped out of line and that her credibility had been compromised beyond repair. This for simple words of condolence for a man many admit was revered across borders. The way I see it is that the CNN equates credibility with staying on Israel's good side. The credibility Nasr is said to have compromised is not about even-handedness or objectivity. It is about never antagonising Israel's supporters.

CNN's big selling point is that it is willing to air all types of opinion and give voice to all types of people, while remaining objective and unbiased. In Nasr's case, this didn't happen. CNN buckled at the prospect of a journalist of Lebanese origins expressing a view that was unpleasant to Israel's friends. The fact that the view was personal, that it was not put out on air, that it was not voiced through a CNN site, didn't matter.

Now here is the interesting bit. While Nasr was being harangued for her alleged faux pas in Atlanta, Georgia, back in Beirut the British ambassador offered her condolences on the official website of the British Foreign Office. She wrote that, "Lebanon is a lesser place the day after" Fadlullah's death. The Israelis protested, but the Foreign Office held its ground. It edited down the condolence by Ambassador Frances Guy, but the diplomat kept her job.

My conclusion is that Zionist control of US media has gone haywire. Any sense of professionalism has been clouded, and even the most robust news organisations are no longer immune to blackmail. The dismissal of the Lebanese journalist comes only a few weeks after Helen Thomas, dean of the White House Press Corps, resigned after suggesting that the Jews should leave Palestine and go back to Europe.

CNN was once a leader of international media and television. It no longer is. Its coverage of the Gulf War was exemplary, but that's all in the past. Today, CNN is not much better than Radio Israel.

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for the Murder of Free Speech