Public Eye
February 26, 2007 1:50 PM

Searching For The Straight Story

By
Hillary Profita
Topics
Behind The Scenes
(Getty Images/Ali Al-Saadi)
If you were watching the cable news at all yesterday, you likely heard the conflicting reports regarding the health of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Amid rumors that Talabani had suffered either a heart attack or a stroke, his son appeared on CNN at one point Sunday to say that his father did not suffer from either. By the time the "Evening News" aired last night, the broadcast was only able to report that Talabani had been flown from Baghdad to Jordan for medical treatment after falling unconscious.

Talabani's doctors today reported that rumors of a heart problem were "categorically wrong." They said that Talabani was in stable condition and recuperating from exhaustion and lung inflammation.

Phil Ittner is a CBS producer and radio reporter based in Baghdad. He explained some of the challenges in covering a story like this one, when accurate information is particularly difficult to come by.

"One of the problems with getting information from inside the Talabani camp is that they have their own agenda," said Ittner. Since Talabani's capability as a leader would be substantially affected by a potentially serious health condition, his "handlers want to politically isolate that reality from general public as long as they can."

This type of situation is certainly nothing new when reporting on governments in which there isn't much transparency, said Ittner. "Stuff like this happens all the time – Cuba is an example," he said. There, President Fidel Castro's health has been a subject of confusion for months. When Ittner covered Russia, "We all knew Yeltsin was in dire health and we were consistently misled."

So in this case, like others, that means many conflicting reports.

"Iraqi officials, who for varying reasons have different agendas, provided different conflicting information. So at some point, yes, we were lied to by people who should have been knowledgable or were otherwise just grossly incompetent," said Ittner.

The best recourse? To speak with as many possible sources as you can. Ittner and others communicated with medical officials in Amman, the Talabani camp in Baghdad, Iraqi officials, and the U.S. military.

"You do your best to canvas as many [people] as possible, until you get a certain amount of consistency," said Ittner. "But until there are hard facts, we can't report them."

"There was information we were pretty confident about last night that we didn't go on with because we didn't have it nailed down, even though it was pretty close," he said. "But pretty close is only good enough with horseshoes and hand grenades."

Add a Comment
by cktirumalai February 27, 2007 12:55 PM EST
The health of political leaders, particularly in sensitive times, is a complex subject and has a long history. When President Grover Cleveland was operated on for cancer of the mouth in 1893, the country was in the midst of a financial crisis. The surgery was performed on board a secret ship off New York. The dentist who was part of the team gave out details of the illness and operation to the papers but he was flatly contradicted by the senior specialists, who declared that it was non-cancerous. The Press and the public believed the latter. The truth did not come out until years later.
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