CNN will no longer give air time to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers "unless there is a compelling reason to do so," Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive and news gathering president, told The Jerusalem Post.

Jordan said he issued the directive last week.

"We want to make sure there is no suggestion of moral equivalence between victims and perpetrators [of terrorism]," he explained yesterday.

The change in policy was prompted by an incident three weeks ago, when CNN broadcast less than a minute of an extensive interview with the wounded Israeli woman who lost her mother and daughter in an attack in Petah Tikva, and then spent several minutes talking about the plight of the suicide bomber's mother.

To make sure this did not happen again, said Jordan, "we put safeguards in." Jordan was in Israel to meet with Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin, who last week called CNN's news coverage "evil, biased, and unbalanced."

The satellite broadcaster YES recently added Fox News to their daily broadcast schedule to give their subscribers an alternative to CNN, and the cable companies are considering following suit.

Some media commentators say that CNN is showing signs of change under pressure. This week, for example, correspondent Wolf Blitzer will present live from Israel a five-part series called "Victims of Terror," which will examine the way Israeli civilians deal with the daily prospect of suicide bombings. In the past, one of Israel's main complaints against the network was that it highlighted the suffering of Palestinian civilians while downplaying the suffering of their Israeli counterparts.

Jordan denied that CNN's Israel coverage was undergoing, or required, a major overhaul.

"There have been isolated incidents which with the benefit of hindsight we would have done differently," he said, citing the Petah Tikva report, "but they were never intentional. We are committed to fairness."

(hit link for full article)