Yes, Amanpour's "muzzled" claim is ridiculous, even outrageous, especially in light of Eason Jordan's mea culpa. And yet I did find this overlooked paragraph in John Burns's now famous piece:
"So we had moved to the Palestine Hotel, but the TV networks were still filing from the information ministry because they were not allowed to file from anywhere else. Which is why CNN got expelled. They refused to go on filing from there; they used a videophone to file their stories on the first heavy night of bombing on March 21. They were caught with a videophone and they were expelled by dawn."
What network did you guys watch during the war, anyway? I watched mostly CNN, having determined it to be much more reliable than the BBC, MSNBC and TV5 (of Francosphere--France and what few vassals it still has left). Fox isn't available here in Thailand, but it wouldn't have made a difference -- we're talking "reliability" here.
Okay, okay, we all know CNN isn't perfectly reliable, either, even before Jordan. (The network to this day still frequently airs "reports" direct from Iranian, Vietnamese and Chinese propaganda bureaus in its "World Report" program.) But hasn't CNN become too easy a target for all blames by all factions on earth?
And into whose hand is this playing. The America-bashers would love nothing more than to establish CNN as "biased". Do they care that CNN's Iraq bureau was actually biassed against America? Hell, no. Here's what they think: CNN is biased; CNN is American, therefore Americans are biased, brainwashed, sinister, stupid, manipulative, manipulated... just inviting the terrorists, really.
That said, here's a note fore Amanpour: While there is naturally a pressure for CNN to be pro-American from its US peers and viewers, that's more than offset by the raucous and, as in Iraq, violent "world opinion" on the other side. If Amanpour doesn't know that, perhaps it's because she indentifies herself with the wrongheaded latter.