Eason Jordan - Full Disclosure Needed
Roger L Simon
By sending their rather opaque email yesterday it is evident that CNN is a bit nervous about the blogs, as well they should be -- Congratulations, Charles! None of us will be satisfied until we see a transcript and/or a video tape of the session. The fact that it has not been produced as yet is highly suspicious. It is almost incomprehensible that verbatim records of events at the World Economic Forum are not readily available to CNN.
Eason Jordan's admitted previous behavior cozying up to the Saddam Hussein regime for news access means that he is an admitted liar of a sort and not to be trusted. Full disclosure, please. That means transcripts and video to understand the context which is under debate.
UPDATE: Some psychoanalysis of Mr. Jordan from Posse Incitatus.
posseincitatus.typepad.com
rogerlsimon.com
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The state of Eason Jordan
The Posse didn't catch the president's speech last night. We watched it this morning and liked it quite a bit. We'll even go out on a limb and endorse his notion of immigration reform (which we may address some other time).
Here we wish to deal with the mystery that is Eason Jordan. Captain Ed, who has made covering this his new full-time occupation, has mountains of posts documenting other times Jordan accused someone of trying to kill reporters. Previously Jordan was a bit more vague.
While we generally agree with the good captain, we must take issue with his assertion that Jordan is peddling anti-Americanism to boost CNN's overseas ratings.
Of course it is possible that Jordan is that cold and calculating, and that he is willing to risk destroying his network's home audience (and brand) for the sake of overseas profits.
However, a simpler explanation is that he has personally come to believe what he says is true.
Months ago we launched a similar examination of John Kerry's mind.
Like Jordan, Kerry stood accused of changing his views to suit his political purposes. The Posse argued (and we still believe) that his flip-flops weren't due to calculation so much as true indecision.
Captain Ed's documentation somewhat bears this out. In 2002, Jordan makes vague statements that he thinks reporters are being targeted in combat zones, but doesn't come out and say who is responsible.
By November, he's willing to openly blame the US military for murdering them, but still not in front of a US audience.
To Captain Ed, this shows his calculation - trying to win over a non-US audience by pandering to their hatreds.
To the Posse, this shows his personal radicalization, something he shares with many on the American left.
Like many on the left, Jordan is no doubt embittered by the popularity and success of George W. Bush.
Unlike them, he has an actual cause of grievance: declining ratings.
Fox continues to pound CNN like a punching bag. Jordan, like so many in the mainstream media, is unused to true competition. He cannot bring himself to blame his own shoddy journalistic practices, so instead he must blame someone else. Fox can't have better reportage, no it must have some sort of political influence.
Enter his crazy military conspiracies.
This makes quite a bit of sense if one thinks about it.
Jordan no doubt believes that the US is torturing women and slaughtering babies. He knows, as surely as the sun rises, that the Bush administration is corrupt and shot through with atrocities - all committed on the personal written instructions of George W. Bush.
He knows this to be true.
How then can he explain the lack of proof?
Simple: everyone who gets too close is killed.
It is paranoia writ large, but that is all it is.
Jordan and his ilk are so far gone that they are incapable of making the logical shift postulated by the good captain.
As we've tried to explain below, Jordan's reality simply isn't the same as everyone else's. He's in his own universe now, one where rape and torture are routine in the US military and reporters that find out about it are murdered.
The war is a failure, a horrible defeat, but CNN can't get the story because if it pushes too far, it's people will be killed.
Oh how he dreams of breaking that story, though. If only enough people understood how the US military operates, he'll get the chance.
Again, the key to this theory is that it is a gradual development. Jordan didn't wake up and decide to go nuts.
Nor do we believe he and his executive team held a meeting and agreed to trash the US in order to boost overseas ratings. The whole point of bias is that it is unconscious.
All of this being said, Jordan must now answer for his charges. CNN's top news executive has charged the US military with deliberately killing protected persons - journalists.
Jordan now has a moral and legal duty to present his evidence and demand a full investigation, or resign from his post.
We do not expect either to happen. We expect CNN will continue to slide in the ratings and that Jordan will take a cushy retirement when the weight of failure becomes unsupportable.
Even then, he will no doubt remain firm in his belief that his ouster was politically motivated by higher ups eager to curry favor with the fascist regime in Washington.
That, of course, is the problem with mental illness: the victim is often the last to know.
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