The blogosphere seems united in seeing Eason Jordan’s unexpected (and, I take it for granted, involuntary) resignation from CNN as evidence of Blogger Power, though there is disagreement on whether it represents a long-needed counter to mainstream media bias or a “tire-necklac[ing] by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang”.
It’s obvious that, had bloggers not complained loudly about Mr. Jordan’s slanders against American soldiers, nothing would have happened to him. It doesn’t follow, however, that CNN was “forced” to act against a top executive. There was no danger that its image would be tarnished, except among people who already regarded it as a conduit for enemy propaganda, so long as 90 percent of the public never heard the story. And, as of yesterday morning, there was little sign that the non-blog-reading public was ever going to hear it. As Tim Blair observes, not a word appeared in the New York Times until its Web site reported last night that “Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who was responsible for coordinating the cable network’s Iraq coverage, resigned abruptly last night, citing a journalistic tempest”. Come, now. A “journalistic tempest” without the NYT is a tsunami without water. As Power Line aptly puts it,
If, like most people, you relied on the conventional media for your news, you would not only be late to the party, you would have no idea what is going on – your first knowledge of anything out of the ordinary would be Jordan’s resignation. Assuming even that will be reported. It would be an interesting assignment: trying to write a story on Jordan’s resignation for a paper that has not heretofore covered the controversy. If Jordan had just announced he wanted to spend more time with his family, he would have made their task easier.
Mr. Jordan’s superiors at CNN probably learned about his Davos remarks from blogs, but it’s pretty clear that the decision to get rid of him was based less on not-yet-imminent public pressure than their own reaction to claims that U.S. soldiers deliberately kill reporters. That is Angry Left paranoia as its most rancid. Liberal though the CNN hierarchy may be, it evidently did not care to have its news operations overseen by an anti-American lunatic. There is, let’s remember, a spectrum of left-of-center opinion. One can oppose the liberation of Iraq without being a Michael Moore, just as one can support it without being an Ann Coulter (who ought to lose her last shreds of respectability for endorsing the murder of journalists).
Buried in news accounts of the Jordan resignation was an indication that he was under a cloud at CNN before Davos:
After several management restructurings at CNN, Jordan actually had no current operational responsibility over network programming. But he was CNN’s chief fix-it man overseas, arranging coverage in dangerous or hard-to-reach parts of the world.
That’s not the way that I’d seen his duties described previously, but it’s the kind of stealth demotion that out-of-favor executives frequently receive. Mr. Jordan had certainly shown plenty of earlier clues to his prejudices: By his own admission, he covered up the horrors of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and he had previously spread claims that Coalition troops tortured newsmen. His loose lips at the World Economic Forum apparently were simply the last, hanging offense.
I find it encouraging that CNN acted before it faced a “journalistic tempest”, for that suggests it isn’t dominated by anti-American bigotry. I also doubt that a tempest would have been helpful to our cause overall. Did we really want to give al-Jazeera the opportunity to recycle Mr. Jordan’s accusations with its own gloss? With no controversy and no videotape, we can hope that the “Americans kill reporters” meme will sink obscurely into the fever swamps. We can also give CNN coverage, for the moment, the benefit of a scintilla of doubt.
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