Franklin Foer (author of last October’s expose of CNN’s “propaganda hut” coverage of Iraq in The New Republic) writes in today’s Wall Street Journal on CNN’s record of obsfucation and lies in its Iraq coverage under the Saddam regime. He particularly lays into “Baghdad” Jane Arraf, the network’s longtime Iraq bureau chief:

When Saddam won his most recent “election,” CNN’s Baghdad reporter Jane Arraf treated the event as meaningful: “The point is that this really is a huge show of support” and “a vote of defiance against the United States.” After Saddam granted amnesty to prisoners in October, she reported, this “really does diffuse [sic] one of the strongest criticisms over the past decades of Iraq’s human-rights records.”

For long stretches, Ms. Arraf was American TV’s only Baghdad correspondent. Her work was often filled with such parrotings of the Baathist line. On the Gulf War’s 10th anniversary, she told viewers, “At 63, [Saddam] mocks rumors he is ill. Not just standing tall but building up. As soon as the dust settled from the Gulf War, and the bodies were buried, Iraq began rebuilding.” She said little about human-rights violations, violent oppression, or festering resentment towards Saddam. Scouring her oeuvre, it is nearly impossible to find anything on these defining features of the Baathist epoch.

And Victor David Hanson in NRO is hardly impressed with the rest of the media in Baghdad either (via Trent Telenko).

CalPundit isn’t very impressed with Rupert Murdoch either; nor am I.