CNN: The Complicit News Network

AP reports the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee asked the Pentagon on Friday to remove CNN reporters embedded with U.S. combat troops, saying the network's broadcast of a video showing insurgent snipers targeting U.S. soldiers was tantamount to airing an enemy propaganda film.

The tape, which came to the network through contact with an insurgent leader, was aired Wednesday night on "Anderson Cooper 360" and repeated Thursday.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., wrote: "CNN has now served as the publicist for an enemy propaganda film featuring the killing of an American soldier."

"This is nothing short of a terrorist snuff film," Bilbray said at a press conference held in San Diego.

Media watchers have been long familiar with CNN's ethics. The network has a history of televising news content with a decidedly global, if somewhat anti-American tone. Beginning most notably with CNN's airing of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in the Black Hawk Down incident, to the more recent CNN reports from a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut where the terrorist group actually used CNN to broadcast unverifiable anti-Israeli propaganda, there are countless examples of CNN defending their "responsibility is to report the news." However, when recently given a chance to do some responsible unbiased reporting, CNN, ever so conscious of broadcast sensitivity, elected not to air Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad out of "respect for Islam."

The military has a name for the way CNN's brand of globalized reporting impacts the battlefield: it's called the CNN-Effect.

NEWSBYTES
CNN airs footage of Iraq sniper attacks

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