Posted on 02/10/2005 3:42:54 AM PST by jocon307
Did Eason Jordan, chief news executive of CNN, actually say the American military has deliberately killed journalists covering the conflict in Iraq? It's a serious question, at least to judge by the heat it's generated....Sean Hannity and the usual Internet suspects have all weighed in. So has Michelle Malkin, who sits suspended somewhere between meltdown and release.
There's a reason the hounds are baying. Already they have feasted on the juicy entrails of Dan Rather. Mr. Jordan...was bound to be their next target. And if Mr. Jordan has now made a defamatory and unsubstantiated allegation against U.S. forces, well then . . . open the gates. [elipsis in original]
I was in the audience of the World Economic Forum's panel discussion where Mr. Jordan spoke.... Rep. Barney Frank, also a member of the panel, interjected: Had American troops actually targeted journalists? And had CNN done a story about it? Well no, Mr. Jordan replied, CNN hadn't done a story on this, specifically. And no, he didn't believe the Bush administration had a policy of targeting journalists....
[O]ne could almost see the wheels of Mr. Jordan's mind spinning, slowly: "How am I going to get out of this one?" But Mr. Frank and others kept demanding specifics....
And that was it--the discussion moved on. I'll leave it others to draw their own verdicts, but here's mine: Whether with malice aforethought or not, Mr. Jordan made a defamatory innuendo....Had Mr. Jordan's innuendo gone unchallenged, it would have served as further proof to the Davos elite of the depths of American perfidy. Mr. Jordan deserves some credit...and some forgiveness...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.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I left in the parts about Barney Frank, because he was very good to challenge Jordon for his outrageous remarks and I put it in NJ topics because Mr. Frank is a native of my current home town of Bayonne. A very patriotic town this is, and I'm glad our native son (super gay lib that he is) stuck up for our military.
And that was it--the discussion moved on.
It is clear from other observers that Gergen, leading the panel, had to stop discussion because the military was not there to defend itself. Defend itself from what exactly? That seems lost in the haze of Mr. Stephens memory, but it is clear that the discussion did not just 'move on'
Sitting on scoops at CNN
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, shocked and awed a lot of people when he confessed that his network suppressed stories of Iraqi brutality.
He also appears to have gratified a lot of fans of the Fox News Channel, CNN's biggest competitor.
the above comes from a Clarence Page piece here, April 21, 2003
In Sept. 2003, Cristiane Amanpour wrote an Op Ed piece in USA Today where she trashed FOX News for bias.
Source: USA Today, September 14, 2003
"CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN 'was intimidated' by the Bush administration and Fox News, which 'put a climate of fear and self-censorship,'"
I think you guys are being unfair. If you are going to bash Eason, you should have the courtesy to bash Christiane Amanpour as well.
Why does this story even have legs? Jordan is the guy who admitted that he covered for SoDamn Insane so that CNN could keep an office open in Baghdad.
What toilet is the media swimming through to find this guy's credibility?
I don't see how Amanpour also being anti-American has much to do with hypocrisy. Hypocrisy to me is the WEF declaring the session off the record after its rules clearly indicate that it was on the record. Hypocrisy is that all of Jordan's defenders, in which I would include Mr. Stephens at this point, ignore that he has made substantially the same allegations before. Hypocrisy is calling what is clearly an accusation innnuendo.
There is no innuendo in saying the military 'targets' (his word) journalists. It may not be quite accusation of murder, but it clearly indicates deliberate intent. And if it was a poor word choice, he could have backed off that word choice with ease...and he didn't. It is clear he used the word target many times. And he is a professional wordsmith he knows darn well what connotation and denotation means.
I think those in the Legacy media see this as them vs. the blogs. I think that is why they are standing firm in their shameful blue wall of silence to defend Jordan. They know this incident further erodes Legacy media credibility, not just CNN's, and increases the value of blogs which broke the story. Even the legacy media that 'breaks' the story wide open has to recognize that they are weeks behind the blogs. They want it to just go away, and they want to keep whatever shreds of credibility they think they have intact.
Just imagine a senior administration official or say, a Marine General, saying something far less inflammatory. Then imagine the press not clamoring for the tape. Think about the screams of coverup when they hide behind an extraordinarily flimsy claim of 'off the record.' Think about all that is missing in this story. Next time anyone in the press screams about 'the public's right to know' about anything, tell them to get the Eason Jordan tape first.
I seldom agree with Mr. Frank, but to his credit, I find him to be one of the most intellectually honest and serious minded politicians in America today. (Hold the flames, I know that he has said lots of things that few one this forum would agree with, but give him credit for seriousness and honesty.)
I read opinionjournal twice a day, every day, without fail. It is the first thing I look at in the morning, and Best of the Web Today is absolutely indispensible.
I've read plenty of articles that I disagreed with, and their tub-thumping over immigration (and btw, I completely shared their views until that fateful day back in 2001) has reached near hysteria lately. And Peggy Noonan had a little petit mal a couple of weeks ago.
But I gotta say, I don't get this piece at all. It's the strangest thing I've ever read on that page. I just don't understand the venomous tone he takes towards those who have critized Jordon, the dismissive attitude towards Jordon's really greivous breaches of news ethics, and yet he basically agrees that Jordon is out of line.
The discussion didn't just go on. Arab and Europeans came up to Jordan and thanked him for the "courage" to tell the truth. His anti-American rant fell on fertile soil. Thank you CNN.
"...give him credit for seriousness and honesty..."
Yes, for a dem he's a gem. (I couldn't resist).
I never knew he was from Bayonne until he got some award from the Jewish Community Center here and there was a bio in the little local paper. He went to Marist High School, so he got a good educational foundation. I don't remember where he went to college.
I don't see why this is a bigger story than CNN actively engaging in propaganda for the enemy. I mean, people at CNN committed treasonous acts by helping Saddam. The hypocrisy was that Amanpour never apologized for her network's appalling behavior, but instead, criticized FOX News.
I don't mean to start an argument. It's just that I hope to see people really pile it on CNN.
WHERE INNUENDO LEADS
CNN's Eason Jordan accused American troops of targeting journalists for death in Iraq. It wasn't the first time he'd made such a remark, and he wasn't alone. Others working for CNN have said similar things, always without proof.
Where this leads is first to outrage--"How dare you accuse our fine soldiers of such an atrocity!" Then it leads to a cry for justice--"Jordan must be fired! CNN must retract! Howie Kurtz must report!" And then it leads to investigation. Curiosity gets the interested reporters going.
And so NRO's Jim Geraghty spent a great deal of time chasing down the "Americans kill journalists" story, posting the results of his investigation here. It doesn't prove anything one way or the other, but can, when twisted by the left, provide fodder for more innuendo.
But what's lost here is that it isn't Geraghty's job to disprove Jordan's allegation. It's Jordan's job, or the job of one of his fellow accusers, to prove it. They made the statement, they must back it up or retract it. The responsibility is on them, not those of us who are criticizing them. The old cliche is that you can't prove a negative, and it's right. Geraghty can't prove that the US military doesn't target journalists, and neither can anyone else. But that's not their responsibility, either. That's Jordan's job--to prove it. That Jordan hasn't backed it up, and that CNN itself has never chosen to run with the story, that CNN has a long and demonstrable history of hostility toward the US military, and that Jordan and his allies at Davos have been engaged in damage control and spin for the better part of two weeks, suggests that they can't prove it and that they know that. All Jordan can do is deny he ever said it, and eyewitnesses exist to say that he did. So the comment, in essence, stands.
So where Jordan's innuendo led and is leading is to one more smear of the US military that will swim its way through the left's fever swamps to end up, eventually, as a recruiting tool in the Arab world, where the culture's information delivery and belief systems exist upon an almost entirely rumor-based culture. The Middle East and the Western left have that much in common.
Absent Eason Jordan formally and publicly retracting the remarks he made, that will be his legacy. More war. More death. More terrorism. That is where his brand of unsubstianted innuendo leads.
This is not right vs left or conservative vs liberal or even about media bias. This is old vs. new. This is big vs little. And the WSJ is both very old and very big. Eason Jordan may not be quite WSJ material, but is from the same world. EJ is much closer to WSJ than Easongate.com or CaptainsQuartersblog.com will ever be.
The first paragraph of this story tells you all you need to know. Stephens' phrasing and wordsmithing is deliberately derisive and pejorative when he describes those who have question Jordan. His Chris Matthews-esque dismissal of Michelle Malkin is particularly telling. This bozo has a "protect the old media" agenda and his column reeks of it. Ironically, Stephens also exposes himself as a lazy "pseudo-journalist" who is more interested in covering the posterior of a cronie than uncovering any kind of truth.
EASON JORDAN MUST STEP DOWN.
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