Posted on 02/11/2005 3:37:13 PM PST by BCrago66
Edited on 02/11/2005 3:48:56 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
EASON JORDAN JUST RESIGNED
Top CNN exec resigning over Davos remarks By Carolyn Pritchard CBS MarketWatch Last Updated: 6:40 PM ET Feb 11, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, said Friday he's resigning amid controversy over his assertion that journalists were targeted and killed by coaltion forces in Iraq. "After 23 years at CNN, I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq," he said in a note to CNN staff. CNN is a unit of Time Warner (TWX: News, Quote) .
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1341459/posts?page=60#60
Agreed, we have to give him that. Blather still won't step down on his own.
R LEE!!!!!!!!!
Works for me.
| The latest news: The videotape of the forum has surfaced. |
| Kurtz Speaks on Mr. Jordan (EASONGATE) Eason Jordan Update |
||
| Eason Jordan, Quote, Unquote - CNN News Chief Clarifies His Comments on Iraq |
The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read]
The New York Times ^ | 04/11/03 | EASON JORDAN
ATLANTA — Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.
**************************************************************
Eason Jordan quits
: Eason Jordan resigns CNN. And I honestly don't get it. If he had been upfront about what he said from the start; if he had demanded that Davos release the tape and transcript; if he had admitted to putting his foot in his mouth and apologized and said he was wrong; if he'd done that, he'd still have a job. For a lesson, see: Dan Rather. But he released obfuscating statements and didn't level with the public he's supposed to serve and now he's slinking away like a criminal when he should be apologizing for saying something stupid. Pride goeth with the fall:CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amid a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq. Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy....He could have called his muckety-buddies at Davos and gotten the tape and released a transcript and admitted his error and apologized for it. But he didn't. I repeat: I don't get it. Could it be that he watched the tape and saw that it was a killer? But how could it have been worse than what was reported already?
"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise," Jordan said in a memo to fellow staff members at CNN.
But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up. There was an online petition calling on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists....
"I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq," Jordan said....
Or could it be that this was a final straw with his bosses, who said that he'd marched on his tongue once too often? If that is the case, then the bosses sure took a long time to decide that.
Oh, yeah, I used to work at Time Warner. They do take a long time to decide anything. It's not easy getting task forces to meet.
Here's what has always amazed me about my business: News people, who are used by PR people, are the worst at figuring out their own PR.
: Jay Rosen has Jordan's statement.
While my CNN colleagues and my friends in the U.S. military know me well enough to know I have never stated, believed, or suspected that U.S. military forces intended to kill people they knew to be journalists, my comments on this subject in a World Economic Forum panel discussion were not as clear as they should have been.: Here's NZ Bear's Eason roundup.
I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise. I have great admiration and respect for the men and women of the U.S. armed forces, with whom I have worked closely and been embedded in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Mosul, in addition to my time with American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen in Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Arabian Gulf.
: Lucianne says: "High tens to the Pajamahadeen - Let the revolution begin"
: At 8:20p I still can't find the story on CNN.com.
Friedman can actually make some sense sometimes. He hasn't frothed at the mouth much lately. I do have a guy here in Indianapolis who writes for the Star who sounds like Ward Churchill. Maybe we could get him thrown in for free.
WOW...
They have lost it beyond all sense.
Looks like some conservatives are posting there to make their day worse.
Best post that a person could put in that mix is..
"Hey....BUSH WON THE ELECTION"
They would all have to seek therapy for months.
We ought to keep one or two around so we can visit them like animals in the zoo...it's kind of fun to watch their heads spin around on their shoulders. But we could throw Jane Smiley in there, too.
A lot of work went into that, thanks. I'll bookmark it.
that is the best one.
Good idea!
But I will wear my slippers.
This is part of a post from DUmmies...
"...I bet the Freeper pressure on CNN was just unbelievable. "
Nothing on H & C as yet.
Score another one for the good guys!
Surely Scarborough will have it. He's the only pundit who's punched the story on TV.
Maybe we should stick with camo jammies.
Ha! I LOVE it!
Only one thing. "Pajamahadeen" is such a GREAT word!
Web site of his next employer:
http://portland.indymedia.org/
Wonder if anyone makes them.....needs a Pajamahedeen Sherif's badge on it too!
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