Slate’s editor bluntly writes what most editors have not said aloud: “I would have fired Eason Jordon.”
The reason, writes Jack Shafer, is in the difference between “a mistake and brain rot.” After recounting the details of the case he asks:
What took Jordan so long to take a stab at clearing the air? I suspect that his Davos comment was neither a mistake nor taken out of context. Not even an octogenarian suffering a senior moment would uncork such a provocative comment before the international elite—as Jordan did—if it hadn’t passed his lips before. The Davos remark has the smell of something he’s probably said before, maybe to CNN staffers or others….
If Jordan knew his previous comments put him in a poor position to clear his name, the best strategy would be to let the story blow over rather than fight it. Only a few marginal editorial pages and columnists (Washington Times, Toledo Blade, Riverside Press-Enterprise) were following the story with any sense of immediacy, anyway. But because of those pesky bloggers, the story didn’t blow over! When Kurtz finally reported on the controversy, Jordan had ample opportunity to make unequivocal statements. Instead, he quivered and melted.
If Jordan ever harbored thoughts that U.S. forces had targeted journalists, a position that could be supported by the Kurtz story, then it was his duty as a newsman to pursue the story by assigning a CNN investigative team to it. If he did, I’d love to see the results. But it’s fairly obvious that he didn’t. Jordan’s dereliction is less a mistake than it is proof of brain rot. The supreme editor of a news organization can’t expect to make unsupportable inflammatory statements and maintain the respect of his truth-seeking troops at the same time. CNN did the right thing to show him the door. I would have done the same.
He also points to some of Jordan’s past statements adding:”This is a man with very strange news judgment.”
Strange indeed…and fatal in the end.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.