BOB GARFIELD: When CNN's senior news executive Eason Jordan went public last week with stories about death threats and torture in Saddam Hussein's regime, stories not reported, he said, in order to safeguard CNN's staff in Iraq, critics were shocked. Jordan spent the rest of the week defending his network against charges that it kept mum in exchange for a ringside seat if and when the bombs began to fall. The New Republic's Franklin Foer wasn't shocked by the revelations; only that Jordan offered them. Foer wrote about the price CNN was paying for access in Baghdad last fall in a piece called Air War: How Saddam Manipulates the United States Media. Frank, welcome back to the show.

FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you so much!

BOB GARFIELD: So when you first saw Eason Jordan on CNN, what was your reaction and did you get phone calls -- "Yo! Cassandra - you go, girl!"

FRANKLIN FOER: [LAUGHS] There is a little bit of that. I was quite frankly a bit shocked to hear him tell the country that CNN had been sitting on some pretty incredible stories, because when I had spoken with him about 6 months earlier he had given me the distinct impression that CNN was giving its viewers a full impression of what was going on within Saddam's Iraq.

BOB GARFIELD:And in fact he gave us the same impression. Let's just listen for a moment to what he told On the Media when he appeared on our show last fall.

EASON JORDAN: We work very hard to report forthrightly, to report fairly and to report accurately, and if we ever determine we cannot do that, then we would not want to be there. But we do think that some light is better than no light whatsoever--

BOB GARFIELD:Now you and others have looked at Eason Jordan's revelations and said ah-ha!-- it's just as we feared -- the world's most important news organization suppressed firsthand stories about Iraq repression in order to gain access. But let's be entirely fair here. The record of Iraqi repression and violence was more than ample -- putting aside for a moment the protection of CNN employees and sources --would the news value of fresh disclosures about a dictator's evil trump the opportunity to report the war and its leadup from the inside?

FRANKLIN FOER: I think that you could make an argument that it would be worth making considerable sacrifices, giving up considerable control over the story to the Iraqi government if in return you were getting something journalistically significant, but in this instance I just think that CNN surrendered too much and they brought back too little to make it a worthwhile compromise.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, but of course CNN had no idea what it would in fact bring back.

FRANKLIN FOER:But they were there for 12 years, and over the course of that 12 year period, I think that CNN should have begun to get a sense of how little they were getting in, in return for the Faustian bargain that they had made. It was clear to me that as their reporters kept getting banned in Iraq, and as they kept getting all this pressure from the Iraqi government, they started pulling their punches. And so I just don't think it was worth it.

BOB GARFIELD:Let's just say that there are other shoes to drop in the region. The administration has gotten quite confrontational with Syria, for example, and perhaps Saudi Arabia isn't in as favorable a position with the administration as it was before the United States had 200,000 military personnel located now in Iraq. What should CNN and other news organizations do or not do for the sake of journalistic purity as we move forward.

FRANKLIN FOER: When they make decisions about covering these countries, I hope that they approach those decisions with the same sort of ethical seriousness that they seemed to approach the decision about embedding with the U.S. military, and I would hope that in dealing with these other dictatorships that they more seriously balance the sacrifices that they're going to have to make to these foreign governments with the material that they're going to be able to bring out. Because I could tell you that in both Syria and Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East you have plenty of exiles who know exactly what's going on in those countries, and I think it's possible to learn a heck of a lot about what's going on in those places without actually being there. And I know that's a huge sacrifice for an organization like CNN to make; I know how important it is for them to have visual images; but these aren't just questions about ratings. They're moral judgments that need to be made about how to cover really horrible regimes, and I just hope they take their moral responsibility seriously.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Frank. Thank you very much!

FRANKLIN FOER: Thank you!

BOB GARFIELD: Franklin Foer is an associate editor of The New Republic.