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 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.)
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.
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.
Here's the most important thing he writes, immediately after stating he was in the audience and directly, personally heard Jordan say it:
"Mr. Jordan observed that of the 60-odd journalists killed in Iraq, 12 had been targeted and killed by coalition forces. He then offered a story of an unnamed Al-Jazeera journalist who had been "tortured for weeks" at Abu Ghraib, made to eat his shoes, and called "Al-Jazeera boy" by his American captors."
Then he goes on to write that this as mere inuendo and not a direct accusation--what?????
The real question the media should be addressing is "Why is it that Jordan's claims would have any credibility?"
In other words, Why would the military want to kill journalists?
Might take a little soul searching to come up with the answer there.