The definitive dispute settler (the tape) has not yet been produced, but CNN’s beset news chief Eason Jordon is being defended by a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
In a piece “‘Easongate’What did CNN’s chief really say at Davos? I was there.” Bret Stephens writes:
There’s a reason the hounds are baying. Already they have feasted on the juicy entrails of Dan Rather. Mr. Jordan, whose previous offenses (other than the general tenor of CNN coverage) include a New York Times op-ed explaining why access is a more important news value than truth, was bound to be their next target.
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 his verdict?
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.
An excellent point. It is indeed the “defamatory innuendo” that you now see in the media (right, left and center) that defines the bias of a CNN, Fox News, CBS, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc (unless it is the outright emotional advocacy of Geraldo Rivera, but that has now veered into enterainment and not real journalism). More:
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.
Now if the tape is produced and confirms all of this, a simmering controversy — which at best can bet attributed to a corporate bigwig who should have been more careul — may be laid to rest.
See this related post.
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.