WHO'S HOT & NOT! (Iconoclast)

3. CNN & REST OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Yet another major media mogul has lost his job after going public with fictional fantasies that cast aspersions on U.S. leaders or institutions. The latest dispenser of disinformation to bite the dust is Eason Jordan, the Chief News Executive of the CNN cable network -- a self-inflicted casualty of the same hubris and insular mentality that earlier had brought down CBS propagandists Dan Rather and Mary Mapes.

Prior to the latest incident that finally cost him his job, Jordan was probably best known for his revelation -- in a remarkable 2003 New York Times op-ed -- that CNN had maintained its access to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq only by sacrificing accuracy, suppressing the truth, withholding information, and covering up Saddam's atrocities. In essence, Jordan admitted that his network had falsified its news reports to retain the good will of a murderous tyrant.

Small wonder that the cable network's ratings took a dive, along with its credibility, and began to fall further and further behind the upstart Fox News Channel -- a decline that has been accelerated by news of the latest fraud perpetrated by a CNN top dog.

The event that finally put Jordan down for the count was his recent allegation at a World Economic Forum panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland, that a dozen journalists in Iraq had been deliberately targeted and killed by the American military. He also spun a tale of an unnamed Al-Jazeera journalist who had been "tortured for weeks" by coalition forces.

Jordan's remarks proved to be too much even for two liberal Democrats in attendance, Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, and he beat a hasty retreat after they criticized his unsupported utterances. But it was too late to recant, and shortly thereafter he was forced to resign after reports of the incident were widely circulated -- first on the Web and belatedly in the establishment press that had initially ignored it.

This was not the first time that Jordan had presented those allegations in public -- the CNN executive had made similar comments at a conference in Portugal late last year, and he got away with it. Thus, as with the efforts of Mapes and Rather to discredit George W. Bush on the eve of the 2004 election, it probably never occurred to Jordan that anyone would ever take exception to his remarks.....

It's just amazing to find anyone to the left of the Democrat party, but CNN manages to do it.

Most people who see the correlation between journalistic tendentiousness and Democratic Party politics assume that journalism is in the pocket of the Democratic Party, and cry "foul!" on that basis. But "correlation is not causation" - at least, not necessarily in the direction you may assume.
We know that journalists are Democrats, at least in sentiment if not card-carrying. But we also know that journalism is the "bad news industry" - that any war or natural or accidental or criminal disaster makes "great copy" for journalists. Why try to prove that Democrats are pulling the strings of journalists, when the journalists have obvious economic motive for their actions? Turn the causation accusation around!

Journalism is an industry of imperfect competition. There is a tremendous "go along and get along" tendency institutionalized within it. Specifically, journalists do not compete over credibility, considering that that would only produce flame wars and give everyone in the industry - horror of horrors - bad PR.

For that reason objective journalism^TM coheres as an establishment.

Since bad news makes good copy, journalism inherently produces a leftist propaganda wind tending to tear down the institutions that make America work. That makes leftism the gutless choice for any politician who is in it for number one.
Journalists go into a snit when accused of "liberal bias," but the truth is that Democrats are the one with the bias - a journalism bias. A bias toward superficiality and negativity which produces the otherwise seemingly incomprehensible situation where good news for America is bad news for the Democratic Party.

stretch: the old geezer here...

I am not good enough at posting articles, but I would like to see other Freepers start investigeting all the networks and posting some of their lies and their failure to report stories such as Oil for Food and other scandals we read about every day. Create the new stories for the Bloggers to pick up on. Accuse the head honchos and bring out the fact they are covering up for terrorists by slanting their stories... and how un-American they are.... bring down each network, one at a time to the point that they lose their credibilitly. I know us freepers can do it... but I am not the one who has the skills to do it. but I sure pass the stories along to a large group. I have faith in us freepersI guess I'm too old to be a leader... but I sure as hell can follow... I'll back you up, cane, crutches and all...

I would like to see other Freepers start investigeting all the networks and posting some of their lies and their failure to report stories such as Oil for Food and other scandals we read about every day. Create the new stories for the Bloggers to pick up on.

Actually I think you kind of have it backwards; more often it is the individual blogger who publishes the first report of an irregularity which his own expertise and particular situation makes him/her sensitive to. I see FreeRepublic as a scouting service to find things that conservative bloggers have individually picked up on, and coalesce them into a critical mass for talk radio to pick up on.
OTOH you can certainly cite the example of Buckhead's early call of "BS!" on the fraudulent "Killian memos." Perhaps it works both ways. In any event, my own personal hobby horse is to analyze and correctly generalize the observed phenomenon of "bias in the media." To that end I posted this vanity thread three years ago, and I have been updating it ever since.
The burden of my song is that the First Amendment, if actually lived up to, is perfectly adequate. We do not live up to the First Amendment when we accept the arbitrary government censorship of the many in favor of the few by which alone the broadcast industry subsists. And we do not live up the the First Amendment if we presume to challenge the decisions of newspapers to print opinions on the front page of newspapers; that is the prerogative of the editor.
Most of all we fail to understand that under the First Amendment we have not only the freedom to speak/print our own opinion, but the duty to ourselves to decide for ourselves what our opinions will be. It is naive in the extreme to assume that journalism is objective, simply because journalism says it is objective. And that silly assumption is the sole intellectual support for the government's creation of broadcasting in general and its encouragement of broadcast journalism in particular.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.