Is the Eason Jordan story about the lynching of a mild-mannered, perhaps slightly inarticulate news executive by a howling mob of bloggers? That has certainly become the favored version among large segments of the media, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which insists that accusing American soldiers of systematic murder of journalists “hardly looks like a hanging offense” and laments that CNN “apparently allowed itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew” into “throwing Mr. Jordan
Those words ring oddly, because Bret Stephens, a member of the editorial board, ended his account of Mr. Jordan’s Davos panel with this query:
Mr. Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making. Whether CNN wants its news division led by a man who can't be trusted to sit on a panel and field softball questions is another matter.
This answer, his colleagues seem to believe, is, Yeah, that’s just the kind of leader CNN news needs. Okay, I can see why CNN’s competitors might think that, but
The most obvious fact about the whole Jordan affair, which the elite media’s anti-blogger spin should not be allowed to obscure, is that Eason Jordan was fired because his “defamatory innuendo”, as Mr. Stephens called it – and, more important, the mindset that it revealed – broke the bounds of decent liberal opinion. Barney Frank – not my idea of a neoconservative – challenged him directly while the panel was in progress, forcing his attempt “to weasel his way out”. Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was in the audience, said later that he was “outraged”. Even moderator David Gergen, the Dr. Perne of contemporary American politics, was, according to an eyewitness, “clearly disturbed and shocked”.
The notion that CNN could be intimidated by the howls of a thousand pajamahadeen, is more than faintly ludicrous. The “lynch mob” metaphor fits badly when the mob is wielding only words. What’s more, it was chanting, not Immolate Jordan! but Release the tape!. All of the most vehement anti-Jordanites clamored to learn what the man actually said before deciding whether he deserved to hang. (A lynch mob that wants to hear from witnesses?) It was the “victim” who proclaimed that the evidence would exculpate him and didn’t lift a finger to make it available.
At most, bloggers made enough of a stir to persuade the top echelon at CNN to look closely at what their employee was saying in their organization’s name. They didn’t like what they found and gave him the boot. It tells us a lot about the low repute of the mainstream media that so many observers, including others in the MSM, can’t believe that a TV network would refuse to let its newsroom be overseen by an anti-American conspiracy theorist. To my mind, CNN’s firing Eason Jordan was no more startling than a university’s dismissing a chemistry professor who taught phlogiston theory. Or am I holding the media to an impossibly high standard?
Addendum: Eugene Volokh has a very sensible view of the “lynch mob” comparison:
[B]loggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they arepersuasive . . . . So Jordan’s critics (bloggers or not) aren’t a lynch mob: If they’re a mob, they’re at most a “persuasion mob.” What’s more, since they’re generally a very small group, they’re really a “persuasionbunch.” . . .
We should love persuasion bunches, who operate through peaceful persuasion, while hating lynch mobs, who operate through violence and coercion. What’s more, journalists – to the extent that they love the First Amendment’s premise that broad public debate helps discover the truth, and improve society – ought to love persuasion bunches, too. When the only power you wield is the power to speak, and persuade others through the force of your arguments (and not through the force of your guns, clubs, or fists), that’s just fine. Come to think of it, isn’t that the power that opinion journalists themselves wield?
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