The media-military complex kicks out CNN whistleblower:
Controversy claims senior CNN executive
By Jacques Steinberg and Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times
Monday, February 14, 2005
Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who was responsible for coordinating the cable network's Iraq war coverage, has resigned abruptly, citing a tempest he touched off last month during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he appeared to suggest that U.S. troops had targeted and killed journalists.
Though no transcript of Jordan's remarks at Davos on Jan. 27 has been released, the panel's moderator, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, said in an interview on Friday night that Jordan initially spoke of soldiers "on both sides" who he believed had been "targeting" some of the more than five dozen journalists who had been killed in Iraq.
But almost immediately after making that assertion, Jordan, whose title at CNN had been executive vice president and chief news executive, "quickly walked that back to make it clear that there was no policy on the part of the U.S. government to target or injure journalists," Gergen said. Jordan was then challenged by U.S. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who was in the audience, and Jordan said he had intended to say only that some journalists had been killed by U.S. troops who did not know they were aiming at journalists.
Nonetheless, accounts of Jordan's remarks - and the apparently favorable response they received from some Arab representatives at the conference - were soon being reported on Internet Web logs, as well as in an article on Feb. 3 on the Web site of the conservative U.S. magazine National Review.
Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said 54 journalists had been killed in 2003 and 2004. At least nine of those died as a result of U.S. fire, she said.
In a memorandum released to his colleagues on Friday night, Jordan, 44, who had worked at the network for more than two decades, said he had "decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my most recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq."
In a separate e-mail message to the staff, Jim Walton, president of CNN News Group, a division of Time Warner, announced Jordan's resignation, which took effect immediately, before praising his 23 years of service at the network. "CNN's global news-gathering infrastructure is largely his vision and achievement," Walton said.
In accepting Jordan's resignation, CNN appeared intent on putting the episode behind it as quickly as possible, perhaps in an effort to avoid repeating the drawn-out tensions between CBS News and the Bush administration last autumn. After broadcasting a report critical of President George W. Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service in early September, CBS defended the report, in the face of criticism on Web logs, for more than a week before announcing that it could not substantiate it.
Asked Friday night whether CNN had had any contact with the Bush administration over Jordan's remarks, a network spokeswoman, Christa Robinson, said, "Not that I'm aware of." Asked whether Jordan had been under any pressure from the network to resign, Robinson said he had not. She said that Walton, the CNN president, was unavailable for further comment. Jordan did not return a message left on his cellphone seeking comment.
Jordan - who once had day-to-day responsibility for CNN's international coverage but whose role had been more a logistical one in recent years - is no stranger to controversy.
In April 2003, he touched off a similar firestorm when he wrote an opinion article for The New York Times saying that CNN had essentially suppressed news of brutalities in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's presidency for fear of jeopardizing lives of Iraqis, particularly those on CNN's Baghdad staff.
"I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me," Jordan wrote. "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."
The online reports of Jordan's remarks at Davos - as well as the only interview Jordan has given on the subject, for an article that appeared in The Washington Post - have come at a challenging time for CNN. In November, the network appointed Jonathan Klein, a former CBS news executive, as president of its domestic network. (His predecessor had been appointed only a little more than a year earlier.) It also gave Klein an ambitious assignment: to somehow reclaim the U.S. ratings lead that CNN had long held but yielded some years ago to Fox News.
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