Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters

NYTIMES ^ | 02/14/05 | KATHERINE Q. SEELYE

[Pikamax]

Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE

his article was reported by Katharine Q. Seelye, Jacques Steinberg and David F. Gallagher.

With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.

In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.

For some bloggers - people who publish the sites known as Web logs - it was a declaration that this was just the beginning. Edward Morrissey, a call center manager who lives near Minneapolis and has written extensively about the Jordan controversy, wrote on his blog, Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com): "The moral of the story: the media can't just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it - and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore."

Mr. Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape. When he quit Friday night, Mr. Jordan said in a statement that, "I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists."

Some of those most familiar with Mr. Jordan's situation emphasized, in interviews over the weekend, that his resignation should not be read solely as a function of the heat that CNN had been receiving on the Internet, where thousands of messages, many of them from conservatives, had been posted.

Nonetheless, within days of his purported statement, many blog sites were swamped with outraged assertions that he was slandering American troops. In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Jordan declined to be interviewed.

But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned.

At the same time, some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.

Steve Lovelady, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal and now managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, has been among the most outspoken.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," he lamented online after Mr. Jordan's resignation. He said that Mr. Jordan cared deeply about the reporters he had sent into battle and was "haunted by the fact that not all of them came back."

Some on line were simply trying to make sense of what happened. "Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?" asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, who says he works as an analyst in Austin, Tex. "Or does it mean that we've entered a brave new world where the MSM has become irrelevant," he asked, using blogger shorthand for mainstream media.

His own conclusion is that the mainstream media "is being held to account as never before by the strong force of individual citizens who won't settle for sloppy research and inflammatory comments without foundation, particularly from those with a wide national reach, such as Rather and Eason."

It was a businessman attending the forum in Davos who put Mr. Jordan's comments on the map with a Jan. 28 posting. Rony Abovitz, 34, of Hollywood, Fla., the co-founder of a medical technology company, was invited to Davos and was asked to write for the forum's first-ever blog, his first blogging effort. In an interview yesterday, he said that he had challenged Mr. Jordan's assertion that the United States was taking aim at journalists and asked for evidence.

Mr. Abovitz asked some of the journalists at the event if they were going to write about Mr. Jordan's comments and concluded that they were not because journalists wanted to protect their own. There was also some confusion about whether they could, because the session was officially "off the record."

Mr. Abovitz said the remarks bothered him, and at 2:21 a.m. local time, he posted his write-up on the forum's official blog (www.forumblog.org) under the headline "Do U.S. Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?"

He did not think it would get much attention. But Mr. Jordan's comments zipped around the Web and fired up the conservative bloggers, who saw the remarks attributed to Mr. Jordan as evidence of a liberal bias of the big American news media.

"I think he was attacked because of what he represented as much as what he said," said David Gergen, who moderated the panel at Davos and who has served in the White House for administrations of both parties. He said he was troubled by the attacks on Mr. Jordan and said that his resignation was a mark of the increasing degree to which the news media were being drawn into the nation's culture wars.

While over the years Mr. Jordan had helped vault CNN to some of its most celebrated triumphs - it was largely through his diplomatic efforts that CNN was able to broadcast the first live footage from the first Gulf War, in 1991 - he also drew criticism. In one case, he wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in April 2003, saying that CNN had essentially suppressed news of brutalities so the network could maintain access and protect its people in Iraq.

Through the latest uproar, the substance of Mr. Jordan's initial assertion about the military targeting journalists was largely lost. Those who worked closely with Mr. Jordan at CNN, as well as on behalf of other news organizations, said he was aggressive and passionate about making life safer for journalists working in Iraq.

Ann Cooper, executive director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that 36 journalists, plus 18 translators who worked for journalists, had been killed in Iraq since 2003. Of those 54, she said, at least nine died as a result of American fire.

"From our standpoint, journalists are not being targeted by the U.S. military in Iraq," Ms. Cooper said. "But there certainly are cases where an atmosphere of what, at best, you can call indifference has led to deaths and other problems for journalists."

As an example, Ms. Cooper cited the shelling by American troops of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, well known as the residence of journalists, in April 2003, killing two journalists. .

But the notion that journalists are "targeted" by the military did not first emerge with Mr. Jordan at Davos. Nik Gowing, a presenter, or anchor, for the BBC, has advanced the theory in writings and speeches that because the media can now convey instantaneously what is happening in a war zone, military commanders may find journalists a hindrance. The Pentagon has dismissed such theories.

In any case, on Feb. 2, Rebecca MacKinnon, who worked under Mr. Jordan when she was a producer and bureau chief at CNN, and organized the blog from Davos, contacted him after seeing that conservative blogs had picked up on his remarks.

"I e-mailed him and said the same people who were after Rather appear to be after you," said Ms. MacKinnon, now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Later that evening, she posted a response from Mr. Jordan, who wrote that on the panel he had been meant to say that when journalists are aimed at and shot, as opposed to being killed by wayward bombs, "such a killing is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a case of 'collateral damage.' "

At about the same time, CNN became aware that trouble was brewing online, and in the wake of Mr. Rather's downfall, it tried to try to head off the storm. When he returned to Florida on Feb. 2 from the conference, Mr. Abovitz said he had messages from Mr. Jordan and from CNN. He sent an inquiry back to CNN but said he did not get a response.

Also that day, CNN's public information division sent an unsolicited e-mail message to many of those who were writing about the controversy. Someone at CNN apparently posted the same statement on several blogs.

The message, which was unsigned, read: "Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan's remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions."

Christa Robinson, senior vice president for public relations for CNN, said that CNN sent the statement to those who sent e-mail messages to CNN or had written about Mr. Jordan online. Asked if the network was consciously seeking to head off the protracted criticism that devoured Mr. Rather last fall, Ms. Robinson said that the network was acknowledging the speed with which news now travels.

Mr. Morrissey of Captain's Quarters said he was surprised to receive the message "I'm sure that what they were trying to do was get people to stop talking about it," he said.

The only way for the network to really clear up the controversy, he and others said, would have been to push for the release of the videotape of Mr. Jordan's remarks.

Ms. Robinson of CNN said that the network had no transcript of the session or a videotape because the conference organizers said that they considered the session off the record. She said that the content of Mr. Jordan's remarks was not in dispute, but that assertion has not satisfied those critics on the Internet who contend Mr. Jordan and CNN have something to hide.

The online attack of Mr. Jordan, particularly among conservative commentators, appeared to gain momentum when they were seized on by other conservative outlets. A report on the National Review Web site was followed by editorials in The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as by a column in The New York Post by Michelle Malkin (a contributor for Fox News, CNN's rival).

Mr. Abovitz, who started it all, said he hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Hear hear!

[MEG33]

Oh good grief..I saw that! They have a mindset and make the facts fit their mindset.

[perfect stranger]

"Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves"

Ask TalonNews, they know the answer to that one.

[Enterprise]

I think Drudge began "open source journalism" when he broke the Lewinsky story after it was spiked by Newsweek. The MSM got just a taste of it at that time, and they got a mouthful when Buckhead hit them between the running lights.

[JPJones]

...they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.

God help the USA, we can't have that! LOL!

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,"

Better than the salivating anachronistic criminal elite! LOL!

[Peach]

Cramer sound just like Jordan; do they have a litmus test over at CNN?

[M. Thatcher]

rampant, unedited dialogue

Otherwise known as...

free speech.

[Enterprise]

To be honest, I believe I HAVE read that he said it twice. But I think I read it on FreeRepublic! HA HA!

[JPJones]

Notice FR is never mentioned in these type of articles...lol!

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Don't you love it when the enemy gives us their well-thought advise? As though they actually cared. I don't know about you, but I'm almost touched. :O)

[Howlin]

This is the quote from Howie I wanted you to see:

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 12, 2005; Page A01

Eason Jordan resigned last night as CNN's chief news executive in an effort to quell a burgeoning controversy over his remarks about U.S. soldiers killing journalists in Iraq.

Even as he said he had misspoken at an international conference in suggesting that coalition troops had "targeted" a dozen journalists and insisted he never believed that, Jordan was being pounded hourly by bloggers, liberals as well as conservatives, who provided the rocket fuel for a story that otherwise might have fizzled.

Fizzled? Of course, he means it would have "fizzled" because the press didn't cover the story at all!

Later in that same article:

As of yesterday, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today had not carried a staff-written story, and the CBS, NBC and ABC nightly news programs had not reported the matter. It was discussed on several talk shows on Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC but not on CNN.

As of Friday!

So they were in the position of not only having to report his resignation, but having to explain WHY he was resigning.

CNN's Jordan Resigns Over Iraq Remarks

Now I'm wondering what other stories have "fizzled out" that we haven't heard about.

[WorkingClassFilth]

Yikes! That florrid slob reeks of alcohol. I can almost hear him slurring!

'Szo, who-o-o-o joo thing wazzah Pres'dent? S'me, dammit! (hic)I'se 'lected in 2000 an' I woulda (hic) kicked ass las' time too. Yo-o-o-o got (hic) a pro'lem wi' that?

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Yes.

[Nick Danger]

I can see how this stuff could get out of hand, but a couple of public hangings now and then are a good thing. They help keep everybody honest.

It will be a while before anybody in the media goes to press again with documents that haven't been properly vetted. There's nothing wrong with that, and if it took Dan Rather's scalp to make it happen, it was a good trade.

Same thing here. Jordan didn't come by his opinions on the military yesterday. His reporters knew his views, even if we didn't. That has been coloring CNN's coverage of the war. The American people do not need some McGovernite skewing the news coverage from the war zone. Better we know; and that he leave.

[MEG33]

RELEASE THE TAPE! That is what we wanted most of all..THEN the truth would be there for everyone to see!

The MSM can cry about "pack of wolves" all they want, truth IS what we want.

You cannot make false accusations against our military in front of a receptive anti American audience in Europe and get away with a lame.."I really did not mean it"

[Howlin]

It's a concerted attack to discredit us because they see the handwriting on the wall.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

The empire is striking back. But they are in such denial. It is so easy to see that in the future, there will be no role for their filtering and "explaining" news. And politicians will never again be able to lie and obfuscate the truth. Their ending is coming.

[Peach]

It's a concerted attack to discredit us because they see the handwriting on the wall.

They can attack all they want but people LIKE the interactive process of being part of a blog or research team that takes on the most hated group of people on the planet. The press regularly polls lower than dentists.

[Interesting Times]

Somehow I'm reminded of the moment when the Eye of Sauron somewhat belatedly notices that its Ring of Power is about to get tossed into a volcano...

[JPJones]

who provided the rocket fuel for a story that otherwise might have fizzled.

...or been buried.