Taking the Eason way out.
Glenn Reynolds
CNN news executive Eason Jordan has resigned in response to the furor over his remarks at Davos about U.S. troops "targeting" journalists. The videotape of those remarks hasn't been released, but I think it's a fair inference that if it had contained anything that would have made Jordan look better, we would have seen the tape instead of Jordan's resignation.
Now people are wondering what it all means. Some people are claiming that Jordan was a victim of "McCarthyism" -- but as Austin Bay notes, that is a backward perspective. It was Jordan who was making unsubstantiated charges, a la McCarthy, not those who called for him to back them up.
What's more, as blogger Jeff Jarvis observed on Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources program today, it was CNN that fired Jordan, not bloggers.
This story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution sums up the nature of the defense:
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Some suggest that Jordan got a bum rap. Former CNN News Group Chairman Walter Isaacson wrote in an e-mail to the AJC that Jordan was dedicated to "the value of hard reporting by real journalists who braved going out into the field, like he so often did, rather than merely opining. It's ironic that he was brought down partly by talk-show and blogging folks who represent the opposite approach and have seldom . . . ventured out to do . . . frontline reporting."
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But Jordan's disgrace comes from not reporting: He made charges in a panel discussion, but he didn't have the evidence to back them up. What's more, in the same report we hear this:
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But Bob Furnad, a former president of Headline News, said he considers Jordan "a very serious journalist in the purest form."
"He never pulled any punches."
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Except that he did. In fact, Jordan came into this scandal damaged by his admitted silence on Saddam's atrocities, a silence that seems to have been the price of operating a bureau in Baghdad. Silence for "access?" Sounds like pulling punches to me.
Instead of complaining about bloggers as a threat to journalism, perhaps journalists should try actually doing more journalism. Who knows? It just might help.
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