RUSH: Here is Ray in Livermore, California. Great to have you on the program, Ray. How are you doing?
CALLER: Rush, I got plaster on my face because of today’s show. CNN collusion dittos. Let me open with that. And, Rush, you are body slamming the fake news just like Trump took down CNN, and it’s great. At the top of your show you mentioned Bernard Shaw in Baghdad in the first Iraq war and how he refused to cooperate with government officials getting some intel because he felt that his job as a reporter was above that, was above American citizen. And there was another part of the story which was reported here on the EIB Network. The only reason that CNN even had a headquarters in Baghdad was because they were clearing all of their stories through Baghdad Bob before they presented ’em to the American people. Do you remember that story?
RUSH: I do. Now, who could forget Baghdad Bob? But Baghdad Bob, if I’m not mistaken, Baghdad Bob was not really known until 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. Baghdad Bob was denying that we were even in Iraq as we were dragging Saddam’s statue across ground, as we were bombing the place to smithereens. Baghdad Bob’s on TV denying that we’re even there.
Now, what Bernard Shaw did — this bears repeating. He’s no longer at CNN, but he was their prime time anchor. He and a producer, somebody, were in the al-Rashid Hotel, which happened to be right in the middle of our target area, and this was the first Gulf War. This took two days. This was when we were trying to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. He was making a move on the Kuwaiti oil fields and he intended to go to Saudi Arabia.
And George H. W. Bush vowed to stop him for the free flow of oil at market prices, which irritated the anti-capitalist left. They started the chant “no blood for oil” and started claiming that Bush really wanted the oil for himself and his rich buddies like Bob Mosbacher and Ken Lay. And all of this was a phony baloney just for Bush to get his hands on the oil.
The bombing run starts and we had to rescue Bernard Shaw. He’s in the al-Rashid Hotel. He’s an eyewitness account to what this attack is causing, damage and everything else. So we rescue him, we get him out of there, and the U.S. military asks to debrief him what he saw, and he refused. Because as a journalist, he can’t take sides. He cannot do anything that would help one side win. His country had just invaded, it was actually Kuwait, but we were bombing Baghdad at the same time. His country was trying to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
The library of Bernard Shaw’s freedom is the United States of America. He is a member of the free press and is so protected because of the United States Constitution, but Bernard Shaw at CNN said he couldn’t take sides. To do so would be to compromise the sacred principles, precepts, concepts, whatever, of journalism. And he refused to be debriefed. And when the news was made public and there was understandable outrage from the American people, he doubled down and said (imitating Shaw), “I’m sorry you don’t like it. I’m sorry, but these are the principles under which I must operate.”
Bernard, what would happen if you’re in the hotel and we hadn’t rescued you and the hotel had blown up and you’re gone? “Well, I would have died in honor of my sacred journalist principles.” It was laughable at the time. And to see Bernard so brave and courageous.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back, however. CNN’s ratings are in the tank. In this past week, CNN had their lowest prime time ratings in something like 13 years.
Not 13 years. They came in 13th place in all of cable this past week — overall, 13th place. They lost… They were behind the Nick at Night channel in prime time. You know what Nick at Night does? Well, it’s cartoons. It’s The Brady Bunch. It’s all these sitcoms from the forties, fifties, and sixties — and CNN came in behind that. Now, this Bernard Shaw story reminded me of something, ladies and gentlemen, involving a former head honcho at CNN by the name of Eason Jordan. After all of the wars in Iraq — you know, Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2 — where Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait, and where we had the Iraqis on the run and we didn’t finish the job.
We let ’em get back to Baghdad, the Republican Guard and so forth. After all this happened, CNN — and you may remember this. CNN was the lone network that continued to have a bureau in Iraq. Now, a lot of news organizations had reporters there in and out. But CNN had a bureau, and they managed to stay. Saddam kicked most of the American media out, but CNN was allowed to stay in Iraq because — and there’s no other way to say this — they ended up broadcasting and pushing Saddam Hussein’s propaganda.
They stayed in Iraq for years because of their collusion with Saddam. Now, we know this because CNN admitted it. Eason Jordan, who at one time ran CNN, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times blowing the whistle on CNN. The headline of his piece: “The News We Kept to Ourselves.” He was the chief news executive at CNN, and what he admitted to, is whenever they had bad news about Saddam or his two kids — whenever they had news that made Hussein look bad — they spiked it. They shelved it. They did not run it.
During the years between Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2, CNN was doing agitprop for Saddam just to be the only media outlet left there, and they covered up and they lied for Saddam for years, including knocking down the reports of Saddam’s mass murders and his rape rooms. CNN was actively denying all of these allegations about Saddam that other news organizations were reporting. I don’t know why he did it, but Eason Jordan wrote an op-ed admitting to all of this. CNN, the point is, has been fake news for a long time. CNN has been fake news and irresponsible for years, many years prior to Donald Trump entering the political arena in the United States.
They have been bad actors for decades now.