CNN is finally reporting on the Eason Jordan quitting story that I’ve been blogging about.
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN)—CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan resigned Friday, saying the controversy over his remarks about the deaths of journalists in Iraq threatened to tarnish the network he helped build.
Jordan conceded that his remarks at the January 27 World Economic Forum were “not as clear as they should have been.” Several participants at the event said Jordan told the audience U.S. forces had deliberately targeted journalists—a charge he denied.
“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,” Jordan said in a letter to colleagues.
“I have devoted my professional life to helping make CNN the most trusted and respected news outlet in the world, and I would never do anything to compromise my work or that of the thousands of talented people it is my honor to work alongside.
“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.” […]
But as I blogged yesterday, here’s the view from someone who was actually there at the conference:
[…] By chance, I was in the audience of the World Economic Forum’s panel discussion where Mr. Jordan spoke. What happened was this: 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.
Here 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. Besides, he said, “the [American] generals and colonels have their heart in the right place.”
By this point, one 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. Mr. Jordan replied that “there are people who believe there are people in the military” who have it out for journalists. He also recounted a story of a reporter who’d been sent to the back of the line at a checkpoint outside of Baghdad’s Green Zone, apparently because the soldier had been unhappy with the reporter’s dispatches.
And that was it—the discussion moved on. I’ll leave it to others to draw their own verdicts, but here’s mine: Whether with malice aforethought or not, Mr. Jordan made a defamatory innuendo. Defamatory innuendo—rather than outright allegation—is the vehicle of mainstream media bias. 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 for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way out of a bad situation of his own making. 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.
And as I myself said earlier….
Jordan had done what liberals do all the time—planted a seed into the brains of barely listening people, so that over time the various already-planted seeds germinate and the liberal ideas contained therein becomes more and more plausible; more and more normal-sounding and acceptable. And often, as with this example, the willing liberal media run with the germ of a (non) story—the facts be damned—simply because some big liberal media twit said it lending some bizarre sense of creditability to the baloney non-story.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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