Their all Dead

In a massive die off of important people, CNN reports on the deaths of Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Gerald Ford.

Ooops! Hold on. They are still alive. As is standard policy for all news organizations, CNN prepares obituaries in advance for famous people. What is different, is that CNN accidentally provided web access to these obits before the fact. CNN has since taken down the stories, but you can sill see them at TheSmokingGun.com.

Hmmm, of course this could all be a practiccal joke by TheSmokingGun.com

UPDATE: Chilling

Wow, it looks like CNN (and no doubt other news sources) have some major ethical problems. Eugene Volokh digs into CNN's past and finds some very unsettling comments that are difficult to reconcile.

Still, while much attention has been paid to the not easily resolved ethical dilemmas of embedded journalists, we have not been considering the dilemma posed by covering an evil dictator. You choose:

• Don't report from the dictatorship, keep everyone safe, but no on the ground reporting.
• Cover the dictatorship, report fully, and blame the dictator for the bloodbath.
• Try to find a balance between Journalistic ethics and Humanitarian Ethics, accepting the grayness.
• Take the path of being purely Ethical in all regards. (I don't see how you can do it, but I am willing to listen.)

BTW, thanks to Scripting News for links to all of these CNN related stories. (For you literary types: that is scripting as in computer programming, not play writing.)

Chilling New York Times Editorial

In his New York Times editorial piece The News We Kept to Ourselves, Eason Jordan describes a terrorfiying account of what we have not been told about Iraq for the past 10 years.

Yes, I worry about the quality of our news sources. I worry about the corporate overlords who twist the news. I worry about the dumbing down of news to the "average" of the demographics. I worry about reporters who become in awe of their star power.

But before today, I never worried that a organization like CNN was withholding information because their reporters were being tortured and murdered to prevent stories from being run.