Captain's Quarters -

AJR Post-Mortem On Eason's Fables: Exempt Media Blew It

Tapscott's Copy Desk points readers to a new article in the American Journalism Review which combines an in-depth interview of Rony Arbovitz with an analysis of the firestorm he touched off at Davos by reporting the comments made by Eason Jordan to the blogosphere. Arbovitz fires his guns at the mainstream media that ignored the story far too long for mere coincidence:

When Jordan dropped his bombshell, contending that 12 journalists had been targeted and killed by U.S. forces in Iraq, Abovitz felt compelled to challenge the CNN executive to back up the charges. "My reaction wasn't that he was lying; my reaction was that he was telling the truth," Abovitz recalls. "I thought what he was saying was going to be blown open wide by CNN in some major exposé, that he was letting us in on some huge Abu Ghraib-type scandal, but much, much bigger."

And so, Abovitz says he told Jordan at the session, "You have just accused the United States of something quite terrible in front of a lot of people who might be quite hostile to the United States, a lot of foreigners, in a pretty anti-American environment. I hope you have something to back it up." ...

Abovitz says he didn't decide to post anything on the forum blog until it became clear to him that journalists in attendance weren't going to write about the episode. So, late that night, Abovitz returned to his room, wrote down his impressions and filed his 1,094-word post. ...

In quick succession he got calls from the Miami Herald, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bill O'Reilly and conservative radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, of whom he had never heard. He marvels at the fact that reporters in Japan and Australia wanted to interview him. He's not especially pleased with most of the coverage, believing that the mainstream press tended to explain away Jordan's statements while the blogo-sphere wanted the CNN executive's head. He's especially critical of the way CNN handled the controversy and believes that the network could have defused the situation by responding more openly and urging the WEF to release the session videotape.

"It's like no one learned anything from Clinton and Monica," he says, "that evading and hiding and spinning [don't] work."

Let's be clear on this point; most of us in the blogosphere had the same reaction that Arbovitz had at the conference. We assumed that his statement portended some upcoming exposé by CNN based on his accusations. After all, Jordan ran one of the largest media empires in the world. If he had information that the US military deliberately targeted journalists -- an allegation that AJR and Arbovitz fail to mention he'd made more than just at Davos -- Jordan had ample opportunity and facility to show the proof. Instead, he remained silent, and it quickly became apparent that he had no proof at all to substantiate his allegations.

We didn't want his head, at least not at first. We wanted his proof. The head of a news organization owes it to the public to back up such allegations with specific evidence supporting them. After all, the Exempt Media has been scolding us for months now that they have editorial checks and balances to keep spurious information from publication -- and here we have the top man at CNN making spectacular charges of murder and conspiracy reaching the highest ranks of the American military.

When it became apparent that Jordan had no proof, we waited impatiently for the rest of the Exempt Media to put their checks and balances into action to demonstrate their superiority. Instead, no one in the traditional press or broadcast networks even covered the story until the night before Jordan's resignation, two weeks after the blogosphere had exposed not only the Davos lie, but a series of statements Jordan had made in foreign venues alleging and/or implying that American and Israeli military wanted to kill journalists. Just as he had sold out to Saddam Hussein during the 1990s for continued photo ops inside Baghdad, Jordan sold out to the anti-American global press to increase his credibility and access with people like Al-Jazeera and others.

Jordan got himself fired. The bloggers merely performed the checks and balances that the Exempt Media claim they employ on themselves, but which have been increasingly shown to be another journalistic urban legend.

CQ In The News

I received a few e-mails from CQ readers informing me that NBC Nightly News showed a couple of screen shots of my blog tonight. In a story called "Blog Power," Jonathan Alter notes that blogs have developed substantial power to change and shape the political and media environment. He pointed to three people who have lost their jobs due to blogs -- Trent Lott (showing Eschaton), Dan Rather (showing Power Line), and Eason Jordan, with Captain's Quarters in the background.

If you're watching the news on the West Coast, you'll see this at 6 pm PT. If you've missed it like I did, you can watch the segment at The Political Teen, who captured it and now hosts the clip. (In fact, check out his entire blog.) It's not a bad segment, even if it contains the ubiquitous hands-typing-on-keyboard shot. Since they show my URL as the entry, I won't gripe about that too much this time. (hat tip: CQ readers Gregory and Beege)

Jack Kelly: Bloggers Aren't The McCarthyites In Eason's Fables

Jack Kelly wrote an impressive column three days ago for the Jewish World Review that I missed. He addressed the mass-media spin on Eason's Fables as a McCarthyite witch hunt perpetrated by a bunch of overzealous wannabes. Kelly points out that the real McCarthyite lost his job as a result of the journalism he once represented:

Web loggers who criticized Jordan are "sons of Sen. McCarthy," said Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum. "It is very worrying to see this marriage between self-proclaimed citizens' media and mainstream journalists' scalp hunters," he said. ...

Pecquerie and Lovelady have their allegations of "McCarthyism" backward. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) became famous in the 1950s for making hysterical and (mostly) unfounded accusations that individuals in the State department and the Army were secret communists. It was Jordan who made hysterical and unfounded accusations against the U.S. military, and it is "mainstream" journalists who are now making hysterical and unfounded accusations against web loggers. ...

But the key fact is not that Eason Jordan is now looking for work, but that bloggers were trying to uncover the truth about what he said, while "professional journalists" were trying to suppress it. For us, the "people's right to know"— which we invoke in self-righteous tones when we're prying into the private lives of people who are not journalists — takes a back seat to protecting the reputations of members of our club.

I've read some good columns on our efforts to just get the truth out about Eason Jordan, but Jack Kelly may have the best retort against the McCarthyism charges I've yet read. In fact, we have been somewhat remiss in not specifically pointing out what Kelly reminds us -- that Eason Jordan, with his vague but grandiose allegations about military atrocities and utter lack of substantiation, represents real McCarthyism.

That particular charge, coming with mind-numbing frequency from the Left, has lost most of its meaning, and so hardly registers any more when heard. But in thinking about it seriously, what enraged the blogging community most about Jordan was that McCarthyite quality of his repeated charges. Both had no evidence, although both were in uniquely powerful positions to make that evidence known had it truly existed. Both used their allegations for political gain; in Jordan's case, promoting anti-American views allowed him the political capital to extend CNN's commercial interests. Both men used the US military as their target. Both men tried to vaguely dissemble when challenged on the merits of their case, and in the end both men crumbled when the spotlight of public exposure trained fully on the facts. In fact, video undid both men, although in McCarthy's case it was the video that was seen by Americans, while in Jordan's case it was the video that remains hidden from their view, at least in part with the silent consent of a news organization supposedly dedicated to ensuring access to information.

One key difference: for Joe McCarthy, the mainstream media finally had the nerve to say, "Enough!" In Eason's Fables, the mainstream media remained an enabler and provided cover for Jordan, literally to the very end. The bloggers, myself included but hardly alone or even first, stepped up and exposed Jordan for what both he and McCarthy were: fools who tried to aggrandize themselves by using slanderous accusations against the US military. That the Left cannot tell the difference between that and the people who ultimately exposed the lies shows exactly how far they have slid into irrelevance and unreality.

UPDATE: Based on the comments I'm getting, let me clarify my point. First of all, I'm talking about McCarthyism more than McCarthy himself. If you define McCarthyism as an attempt to smear people with unsubstantiated allegations of felonious and even treasonous conduct, then Eason Jordan and Joe McCarthy fits that bill.

One of the commenters who argued that McCarthy was proved correct did hit the point: McCarthy refused to substantiate his claims publicly. He also provided inconsistent numbers of people he supposedly could prove, and he bullied people in hearings by asking blustering, "have you stopped beating your wife" kinds of questions. The parallel isn't that Jordan and McCarthy were equally wrong; the parallel is that both refused to provide substantiated allegations, and in both cases their motives were not to clean house but to advance themselves politically by smearing others.

Joe McCarthy may have been right, but when you look at the entire episode dispassionately, that turned out to be coincidental, or at least inconsequential. He was a dangerous fool who set back anti-communist efforts for 30 years thanks to his antics.

Eason's Fable At The Weekly Standard

The Weekly Standard has published my column on the mass-media response to the Eason Jordan controversy, titled "Eason's Fable", on their Daily Standard website. Jonathan Last asked me to write a brief look at the media (non)reaction to the blogswarm that resulted in Jordan's resignation, and I wound up writing something on the order of War and Peace -- you've seen my posts, you know what I mean. Jonathan expertly trimmed it to readable length, and I'm quite grateful for his confidence in me and his editorial expertise.

I've used my own notes to reconstruct the timeline of events showing the almost-total abdication of news organizations from the story and how Jordan's abrupt exit left them panicking for an explanation:

FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media blackout to force Jordan from his job, discredit the American media, and start a debate on the nature of blogging that derived directly from the mainstream media's attempt to cast the entire effort as a partisan witch hunt.

But the media has no one but itself to blame--as it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of the controversy, with major national outlets making Eason Jordan's resignation their very first report of the story. Even worse, the media had the story first, and buried it.

Well, RTWT, and all that, of course.

Obviously, the mainstream media have a vested interest in attacking the same blogosphere with which they compete for credibility, if not for income. However, this image of an unmitigated witch hunt and bloodfeast boggles the mind. Not only did the blogswarm find damning information which the national media could have used all along, but we repeatedly sent the information in e-mails to key people in the media. Instead of acknowledging that function and assimilating the information, the media has circled the wagons around the myth that Eason Jordan simply committed a slip of the tongue at Davos, rather than the documented string of slanders and ethical lapses stretching over more than a decade.

What choice do they have, however? If they don’t push that mythology, they face the daunting prospect of explaining their lack of coverage, continuing to this day, of all the details on Eason’s Fables. The broadcast networks must find a way to justify their silence to viewers who will be understandably puzzled to find out more than two weeks after the fact that Jordan has a long history of selling out for foreign access, including making accusations of atrocities without ever presenting any evidence to support them. The nationally prominent news outlets will be forced to admit that they were scooped by the blogs.

Unfortunately, by blaming the bloggers, the media will drive more and more of their viewers to these sites to determine what purportedly drove the blogswarm into a virtual Salem. Once their customers get a chance to review the evidence, their mythmaking will do more damage to their credibility than a thousand blogswarms could ever have done.

Democracy In Action Clueless About CNN's Operations?

I just received a hilarious e-mail from Danny Schechter at Democracy in Action, which wants to alert me to the vast conspiracy by Fox News to discredit CNN by attacking Eason Jordan. This mass e-mail has so many holes and fallacies in its arguments that it's hard to know where to begin -- but I'll just start at the top:

Dear Media for Democracy Member,

Er, no. Not that I mind seeing what they produce, but I'm not a member, nor have I subscribed to any of their services.

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit late last week amid a furor over remarks he allegedly made about American soldiers intentionally killing journalists in Iraq.

Allegedly? Even Jordan admitted making the remarks; he just claimed that people in attendance misinterpreted them. Eight different witnesses verified Rony Arbovitz, including Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd, hardly members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Jordan delivered the remarks while sitting on an off-the-record panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It was so off the record, in fact, that the WEF quoted its participants in its own summary posted on the WEF website.

While no actual tape of his comments has yet to be released, an attendee disseminated news of the event into the blogosphere and ignited a firestorm, which included charges that CNN itself -- not just Jordan in his personal capacity -- had "slimed our troops."

Not exactly. What we demanded was that the tape be released and that if Jordan had indeed made unsubstantiated allegations of atrocities against the US military, then CNN either needed to produce evidence of such or dismiss Jordan. If CNN failed to act, we argued, that was tantamount to supporting an act of slander, and CNN's credibility would suffer greatly as a result. Everyone I've read on the subject who accused Jordan specifically of "sliming the troops" leveled that accusation only at Jordan himself.

Leading the charge was CNN competitor Fox News Channel and its sister publication, The New York Post.

Hey, I like the Post and Fox, but they hardly led any kind of media "charge", as a review of the history will show. Fox reported briefly on a Wall Street Journal subscription-only blurb and dropped it for a week. The Post didn't do a lot more with it until a couple of days before Jordan's resignation. Hugh Hewitt could have been said to have led the charge, perhaps. The ignorance of Schechter shines through with this silly lie.

Members of Congress piled on with angry demands for evidence although the tone of their remarks suggested a total denial of the possibility that Jordan may know something that they didn't.

Here's where we get to the true stupidity of Schechter's e-mail. First, members of Congress objected from the moment the words flew out of Jordan's mouth, because he had no evidence for his allegations. Barney Frank asked him for evidence during the forum, and as David Gergen repeats ad nauseam these days, Jordan "walked it back" to mistaken identity after being challenged.

But more directly, Eason Jordan runs one of the world's largest news agencies, whose business is informing people of what they do not already know. If Eason Jordan had specific evidence of these atrocities, it should have led their news program at prime time in America and around the world. Does Schechter think that CNN is some sort of commercial CIA? In Schechter's world, do journalists and news execs run around telling people about the stories they have and then spike them just to pique their interest?

Does Schechter have any clue how obtuse that statement reads?

Instead, Jordan's patriotism and CNN's integrity was attacked.

Yes. Selling anti-Americanism in order to gain access to foreign markets that salivate for it, and lying about our own troops to do so, does strike some of us as rather unpatriotic. Stoking hatred of American service members merely to bolster one's bottom line does not reflect well on one's integrity, and since Jordan represents CNN in these forums, that reflects poorly on CNN's integrity as well.

Schechter then flags three "urgent issues" for me to consider:

1. Do media executives have a right to express opinions that deviate from the official line? Media companies should defend the rights of their employees to take part in democratic debate without fears of recriminations. The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and the World Editors Forum have rushed in to defend Jordan's right to express controversial opinions without intimidation.

Media companies should defend the rights of all people to take part in debate without fear of recrimination. Free speech, however, does not protect libel and slander. Nor does claiming "intimidation" every time someone criticizes one's speech create a debate; that argues for an echo chamber, where only one side gets to talk. That model has expired, and Schechter doesn't much like it.

As for the WSJ and the World Editors Forum, if they truly have done what Schechter says, they've missed the point. Jordan didn't just express an opinion, he made specific allegations of criminal conduct, and he did so on more than one occasion. Even if it was just his opinion, we have a right to criticize tha opinion by expressing our own opinions, and when he fails to produce evidence, then Jordan looks like an idiot, a sell-out, and/or a liar. The First Amendment doesn't protect one from the consequences of their speech.

2. Do media companies have an obligation to investigate and not just denigrate?

Yes! That was our entire point! If Eason Jordan thinks that the American military assassinates and tortures journalists, then he has a responsibility to investigate and produce evidence before issuing denigrating and slanderous accusations. After all, Jordan ran one of the largest media companies in the world.

CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, AFP and other media outlets should take a fresh look at these charges to determine their validity.

Perhaps they can do that after they report on what Jordan actually said in the first place. None of the agencies named by Schechter have called for the release of the Davos videotape or have reported on Jordan's similar charges in November 2004 or October 2002.

3. Are we who care about integrity in the media willing to stand up to protect free speech during a time of war? While this issue is often spun as a left-right story, it's about much more than that. We are all paying dearly for this war. Shouldn't we Americans have a right to know what's being done in our name?

That's two separate issues -- free speech and transparency in government. I have to say that someone who sends out as badly researched and antagonistic a message as this, and then has the nerve to imply that free speech is an endangered species, has got a serious screw loose. Anyone who experienced the vitriol and personal attacks on the streets during this past election aimed at our current president and his staff should have recognized that the First Amendment remains alive and well. In fact, I think campaign-finance reform constitutes a much greater threat to political speech than anything Schechter argues in this missive.

In terms of transparency, Schechter wants news agencies to pull soldiers out of units to be available for journalists' investigations at whim. However, Schechter fails to recognize that journalists accompanied US troops into Baghdad and given their own testimony to the notion that American troops targeted journalists during the battle. Jules Crittendon of the Baltimore Sun was embedded with the unit that fired on the Palestine Hotel, the premier incident which people like Schechter point out as evidence of an assassination strategy, and thoroughly debunks it. Why doesn't Schechter simply pick up the phone and ask Crittendon?

Schechter can send all the e-mail missives he likes, but his arguments are losers. He gets his facts wrong, he mixes his arguments, and he can't determine the difference between oppression and opposition. Having people like Schechter on their side may well be the primary reason CNN pushed Eason Jordan out the door.

Brent Bozell Slams The "Lynch-Mob" Meme

L. Brent Bozell writes about the blogswarm surrounding Eason's Fables in today's National Ledger, and he slams Eason Jordan for his unprofessionalism and compares CNN to Richard Nixon's White House. Bozell also castigates the media that ignores the central facts up to the present day, and cites CQ and myself as an authority:

If these charges were true, they would make Abu Ghraib's naked pyramids pale by comparison. But they were wild and reckless accusations, which explains Jordan's subsequent, furious backpedaling and denials. Still, it begs the question: Why would a man whose profession and expertise was "newsgathering" make such wild charges without evidence? ...

But then Jordan and CNN added to the outrage by refusing any attempts to release a transcript or videotape of the off-the-record panel discussion. What a spectacle: a news outlet always championing the public's "right to know" and crusading for "full disclosure" clamping down like the stereotypical arrogant multinational corporation they like to expose. Richard Nixon, meet Eason Jordan. Does anyone believe that if President Bush (or Vice President Cheney or Secretary Rumsfeld or fill in the blank) claimed in an off-the-record forum overseas that Ted Kennedy was a murderer, that CNN wouldn't be in the front of the line demanding that the administration release the videotape?

That may be the most apt analogy I've yet heard about Eason's Fables. If CNN didn't demand the videotape of such an event, no doubt all other media outlets would, especially if it turned out that Bush or one of his staff regularly made such accusations at political events. Just look at the recent contretemps over the GOP calling Harry Reid an obstructionist. That detailed, 13-page memo with voting records and public statements from the new Senate Minority Leader resulted in a petition signed by all Senate Democrats calling on Bush to publicly disavow the statement -- and got coverage from every single national news outlet, as well as plenty of pundit analysis.

Bozell then remarks on how little the media has actually done to inform its viewers and readers about the nature of Jordan's transgressions by referencing the work published here at CQ, gathered from a number of blogosphere sources:

Controversy was also deepened when bloggers like Ed Morrissey (at his blog "Captain's Quarters") reported that this was not a one-time gaffe for Jordan. Morrissey said Jordan had also "accused the U.S. military of torturing journalists (November 2004) and the Israeli military of deliberate assassinations (October 2002) at journalistic forums, all overseas and outside the reach of most American media."

These accusations are stop-the-presses huge. So why didn't CNN ever produce some evidence for these charges and put them on the air? And if they weren't true, why wasn't this man fired long ago?

CNN never aired them because CNN had no evidence to support the charges. No one doubts for a second that CNN or any of the other media outlets would love to break a story like that. If true, I'd want them to do it. But what Jordan did, on several occasions, was to pass along rumor as fact in order to bolster his anti-American credentials so that he could gain or retain access for CNN in some of the world's worst dictatorships and kleptocracies, those countries which have a vested interest in selling anti-American rhetoric to their subjects.

Bozell also presents the best analysis so far of the media blackout's result:

Amazingly, most of the major "news" media avoided this news -- especially CNN. So when Jordan resigned, it made the blogs seem so powerful that liberals started attacking them for recklessly destroying Jordan's career, even using goofy terms like "cyber-McCarthyism" to denounce it. But what the bloggers did here was deliver information and accountability, the same things the major media purport to be providing -- unless it's one of their own in the hot seat.

That reaction will wind up driving readers to the blogs to research this supposed witch hunt, where they will find much more to Eason's Fables than the pathetic treatment given in the mainstream press. That will be a body blow to the MSM's credibility and create much more demand for the blogosphere. The media, much more so than in Memogate, has done far more damage to itself than the bloggers could ever have done.

Washington Times: Salivating Morons Trump Media Elites -- Again

The Washington Times runs two opinion pieces in today's edition on the media reaction to Eason's Fables and the bloggers who pushed the story to the surface. First, in its unsigned editorial, the Times scolds the Wall Street Journal for its reaction to bloggers and their role:

Add "salivating morons" to the mainstream media's growing canon of stupid things to say about the ever-vigilant bloggers. Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, the self-styled flagship of journalism, said this in the fallout of CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan's resignation on Friday: "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." Add also, as loath as we are to do so, the Wall Street Journal's editorial comment from yesterday that professional journalism, of which it proclaims membership, is much better than "the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs." ...

Throughout the "kerfuffle," we have attempted to keep our readers informed about what Mr. Jordan said and why it mattered. To do so, we relied heavily on the fine reporting done by the blogosphere: Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, Edward Morrissey of Captain's Quarters, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson of Power Line, Michelle Malkin and numerous others. A few mainstream folks jumped on board as well, including the New York Post, the New York Sun, Investor's Business Daily, Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report and Lawrence Kudlow. Even the Examiner, Washington's newest daily, ran an editorial yesterday.

The meme among those outlets that didn't provide coverage is that the bloggers were on a headhunting spree, when in fact very few called for Mr. Jordan's immediate resignation. If any underlying theme could be found, it is called truth-hunting — and CNN had an obligation to get it. When influential members of the media defame our troops, they should answer for it. If that's moronic, sign us up.

The Times was among the first mainstream media organs to publish anything about Eason's Fables, if not the first. Not only does the Times rely on bloggers to signal a breaking story, as the editorial states, they have no reluctance to name us as their sources. This is not the first time I've seen my name and blogsite on the pages of the Washington Times, and that demonstrates an integrity that others in their circle have a difficult time matching. The Times appears to be far ahead of its rivals in creating a new synthesis of old and new media, and as they move in that direction, bloggers and their readers will follow.

Douglas MacKinnon also notes the role that the rest of the media played in Eason's Fables, that of the silent chorus:

I have a number of friends at CNN whom I know to be honest, ethical and hard working. I have to believe that they are horrified and ashamed that their own network ignored a major story about their own news president. It is for that reason that the death knell for the liberal mainstream press has been sounded. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and the major left-leaning newspapers — such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA TODAY and many others — made a conscious decision to keep a major news story away from the American people.

Fortunately, the bloggers have once again pulled the curtain back to reveal that the feeble old man controlling the make-believe world of "unbiased" media is a fraud, and a dangerous one at that.

The rap on the bloggers so far after Jordan's resignation is that we conducted a witch hunt, and Jordan was nothing more than a victim. The dreaded term "McCarthyism" has been thrown at us as well. However, a witch hunt demands innocence of its victim, and Jordan was anything but. He had made repeated, slanderous allegations against the US military in foreign venues, ensuring access for CNN in places where anti-Americanism sells best. We demanded to see the videotape that the World Economic Forum made and from which they quoted the participants, only to be told the forum was "off the record". CNN and Jordan never stood up for the truth and demanded the release of the videotape, despite their later protestations of misinterpretation and the WSJ's accusations of "vendettas".

So remind me again -- who was working for the truth, and now who wants to argue for stonewalling? The Times knows, and gets it right. This "lynch mob" meme will suffer the same fate as the media blackout which preceded it, and the mainstream media will lose that final fig leaf, standing exposed for all to see. (hat tip: CQ reader John M.)

A Closer Look At Bret Stephens

After the revelation that Bret Stephens used the Wall Street Journal's unsigned-editorial slot to issue an institutional (and anonymous) defense of his own work yesterday -- one that raised a firestorm of opposition among OpinionJournal.com readers -- CQ reader Dianne sent me some background on Stephens that may explain some of the issues at the WSJ. Joel Leyden wrote a valediction for Stephens for the Israel News Agency on the announcement of his departure from the Jerusalem Post (emphases mine):

I have also heard the adage: "don't kiss and tell" and my father once told me "don't ever bad mouth anyone you ever worked with." And we all know that cops don't rat on cops and journalists don't bash journalists. It's a standing rule for which I am now breaking. As a "disgruntled former employee" I can talk, my colleagues at the Post cannot - due to fear. Fear of being fired and a clause in their Israeli contracts which states that they are not allowed to speak to the media.

Before I address any more of Leyden's criticism of Stephens, I find that bolded statement rather telling in the wake of Eason's Fables and the media blackout that followed. It's the first time I've seen that analogy expressed in print by a media source, although the comparison occurred to me more than once over the past two weeks. I heard John Podhoretz talking about this a bit more obliquely last night with Hugh Hewitt, in his analysis that media sources don't compete much at all, but instead act as more of a large co-op or monopoly. They compete locally; John's Post and the Daily News have no problem criticizing each other, but they're going after the same readership in a crowded and narrow marketplace.

NOTE: I am retracting the rest of this post. On further review, I've decided that this entry probably treated Stephens unfairly. This mostly had to do with an editorial decision originally reported to have been made by Stephens, which later turned out not to be the case. I apologize to Mr. Stephens for the post.

Geraghty Points Out Portugal On PBS

Thanks to a phone tip I received from a family member, I found out that Jim Geraghty of the National Review's TKS blog appeared on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour on PBS. While an official transcript has not been made available, the new Google video service has this from the closed-captioning of NewsHour (emphasis mine):

at 52 minutes

Are there bloggers whose motivation is really to attract attention to themselvess? >> [Jim Geraghty:] Like I said there are a lot of bloggers out there. I wouldn't doubt that there are some who thought this is a great way to attention to get traffic to my blog. I can't buy into this argument that this is one slip of the Tongue. At a conference in Portugal last fall he said that several journalists were taken to the Abu ghraib prison complex and tortured there. If he's got this kind of evidence for these stories he should come out and show it.

at 52 minutes 30 seconds

I'll admit a lot of people took into this story was his comments about not reporting everything he knew about Saddam Hussein in a run-up before the Iraq war. I Admire him for coming out and saying this. He came into this controversy with a black Mark on his record that a lot of people caused them not to cut him Slack they might have otherwise done. >> Smith: thank you all three very much. Certainly leaves one with the feeling that this whole debate is not over yet.

Kudos to Jim for getting PBS viewers the story that the network seems to want kept quiet.

The WSJ Disappoints (Update: More Conflicts?)

Normally, I read the OpinionJournal every day, although I rarely link to it; I agree with most of what they write and don't have much to add. Imagine my surprise, then, this morning when they not only clearly demonstrate that they learned nothing from the Eason Jordan debacle, but also attack the bloggers who participated in holding him accountable for his actions. In their unsigned editorial, the WSJ lashes out at CQ and the rest of the blogosphere for driving Jordan out of his job:

By now, everyone on the Good Ship Earth knows that this particular story ended Friday with Mr. Jordan's abrupt resignation from CNN. This has certain pundits chirping delightedly. It has been a particular satisfaction to the right wing of the so-called "blogosphere," the community of writers on the Web that has pushed the Eason story relentlessly and sees it as the natural sequel to the Dan Rather fiasco of last year.

As for Mr. Jordan, he initially claimed that U.S. forces in Iraq had targeted and killed 12 journalists. Perhaps he intended to offer no further specifics in order to leave an impression of American malfeasance in the minds of his audience, but there is no way of knowing for sure. What we do know is that when fellow panelist Representative Barney Frank pressed Mr. Jordan to be specific, the CNN executive said he did not believe it was deliberate U.S. government policy to target journalists. Pressed further, Mr. Jordan could only offer that "there are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out" for journalists, and cite two examples of non-lethal abuse of journalists by ordinary GIs.

None of this does Mr. Jordan credit. Yet the worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony.

The editors at the WSJ, once again following Bret Stephens' lead, only tell the part of the story that advances their opinion. Nowhere yet in the OpinionJournal forum has the writers or editors addressed the fact that Davos was not an isolated incident. I find this distressingly odd, since the WSJ obviously knows of the earlier incidents. In fact, they reported on them today, in an article by Jack Flint on page B1 of the WSJ:

Mr. Jordan's new appointment as chief news executive came only months after he penned an opinion piece for The New York Times in which he said CNN had held back on reporting some of the brutalities of Saddam Hussein to protect the network's Iraqi staffers. Some commentators accused the network of considering access to Iraqi officials to be more important than accurate coverage.

In his new post, described by some as CNN's "secretary of state," Mr. Jordan still traveled the globe but in a more diplomatic role. It was also around then that the exuberant Mr. Jordan, who had been good at putting out fires, began setting them, much to chagrin of CNN brass. Prior to his remarks at the World Economic Forum, Mr. Jordan had made similar comments about journalists killed in Iraq at a conference in Portugal late last year.

Opinionjournal's editors cannot claim ignorance of the Portugal comments, which demolishes the notion of the entire hubbub resulting from one "indefensible remark". Why don't they mention that earlier comment, or even the one made by Jordan in October 2002 about the Israeli military that turned out to be just as false? Perhaps they got too steamed over my assertion that Stephens failed to disclose a connection to Eason Jordan to think rationally:

It is for this reason that we were not inclined to write further about the episode after our first report. For this we have since been accused of conspiring on Mr. Jordan's behalf. One Web accusation is that Mr. Stephens is--with 2,000 others--a fellow of the World Economic Forum, thereby implying a collusive relationship with Mr. Jordan, who sits on one of the WEF's boards. If this is a "conflict of interest," the phrase has ceased to mean anything at all.

I assume that the OJ editors read my objection or that of the Dinocrat, and they have mischaracterized the conflict in any case. Stephens belongs to the Forum of Young Global Leaders, which has exactly 1,111 members and is closely affiliated with the World Economic Forum, which means Stephens has an interest to protect with the WEF that he did not disclose. The YGL forum appears to fall under the purview of none other than Eason Jordan, whose bio describes him as a member of the WEF's Global Leaders of Tomorrow programme. Whether or not that influenced Stephens' reporting is only known by Stephens, but that connection should have been disclosed to WSJ/OJ readers, and the OJ's defense of his silence speaks volumes about their editorial standards. (They also made my mistake of calling Jordan a "board member" of WEF, which I retracted here, so I'm fairly sure that the OJ has my blog in mind.)

The poor response of the OJ to repeated, unsubstantiated allegations of American military atrocities by the chief news executive of a global media outlet was bad enough. This attempt at shifting blame to the people who did the work they should have been doing all along shows that the WSJ/OJ operate under the same blinders as their counterparts in the more mainstream media outlets, and as a result, risk the same irrelevancy.

UPDATE and BUMP, 4:12 PM: Hugh Hewitt reports that Bret Stephens wrote the editorial. Now, look at this section of the passage:

It is for this reason that we were not inclined to write further about the episode after our first report. For this we have since been accused of conspiring on Mr. Jordan's behalf. One Web accusation is that Mr. Stephens is--with 2,000 others--a fellow of the World Economic Forum, thereby implying a collusive relationship with Mr. Jordan, who sits on one of the WEF's boards. If this is a "conflict of interest," the phrase has ceased to mean anything at all.

So now Bret Stephens has fallen to defending his own work and dismissing his own conflict of interest under the imprimatur of an unsigned editorial -- and the WSJ wants us to understand that they see no conflict on this? No wonder the OpinionJournal.com response page has yet to be updated.

More from the Dinocrat, which first noted this conflict.

Michelle Malkin Takes On The Lynch-Mob Meme

Michelle Malkin, who is a CQ favorite as most of you know for many reasons, takes on the weekend's "lynch-mob" meme that the mainstream media is using for its Eason Jordan coverage. In today's New York Post, Michelle pulls no punches in telling the media elite that they have lost their monopoly on information, and that they fail to recognize real journalism when they see it:

The resignation of CNN executive Eason Jordan last Friday night caused near-fainting spells in the journalism world. And now the backlash against the blogosphere — the legions of Internet citizen journalists who pressured Jordan to come clean about controversial remarks he made at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 27 — has begun.

Take Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum, the organization for editors within the World Association of Newspapers, please. Mourning Jordan's decision to step down, Pecquerie likened bloggers to the "sons of Senator McCarthy" and "scalps' hunters."

Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review Daily Web site, blasted Jordan's Internet critics in an e-mail to New York University professor Jay Rosen's blog PressThink (available at journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink): "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

Also on Rosen's site, reader William Boykin fumed: "Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a street gang." And these unhinged heavy-breathers accuse bloggers of being a lynch mob?

Hard-nosed, aggressive journalism requires that sacred cows suffer examination, and sometimes that examination reveals ugly truths. Journalists used to know this. Unfortunately, they now apply it only to those who fit their political beliefs as acceptable targets -- the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general. When the sacred cows of the Left come under the exact same kind of aggressive journalism but unfettered by editors with political agendas, then we have balanced coverage and the promise of the full truth getting out to the public.

That, supposedly, had been the mission of the mainstream media. Based on their hysterical reaction to our demands for accountability from media executives, just as the media rightly demanded accountability from corporate executives cooking their books, that mission has been eclipsed. And if it has been eclipsed, as this "lynch-mob" excuse and the media blackout on Eason's Fables that preceded it demonstrates, one has to wonder what exactly eclipsed it. From our point of view, their mission appears to track quite closely with the American Left's mission of isolationism, growth of the federal government, and stepped-up attempts at redistribution of wealth.

We didn't want Eason Jordan's head because Eason Jordan works for CNN. We wanted accountability for a corporate executive that went overseas on multiple occasions to issue slanderous allegations against the US military simply to drum up business and gain a competitive advantage for access in countries already hostile to the United States. Jordan's big mistake was assuming that Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd had the same agenda that Jordan does. Fortunately for America, these liberal politicians won't stand for the slander of our men in uniform, and I for one will never forget that.

Perhaps the media will learn the lesson of accountability to its readers and viewers after Eason's Fables, even though they failed to do so after Memogate. Based on the clueless responses seen so far, they can look forward to a couple of more blogswarms before they figure it out.

NYT: What Drove The Eason's Fables Blogswarm?

Yesterday afternoon, I spoke with New York Times reporter David Gallagher about the blogswarm surrounding the remarks made by Eason Jordan at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We spent the better part of an hour discussing the controversy itself and the blogosphere's reaction, and Gallagher asked some tough but fair questions about my response. The interview forms part of the NYT's look at the implications of the blogswarm coming out in tomorrow's edition:

With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.

In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.

For some bloggers - people who publish the sites known as Web logs - it was a declaration that this was just the beginning. Edward Morrissey, a call center manager who lives near Minneapolis and has written extensively about the Jordan controversy, wrote on his blog, Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com): "The moral of the story: the media can't just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it - and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore."

Gallagher et al give a balanced look at the blogosphere's reaction to the blogswarm, on which the article focuses rather than the controversy itself. If any criticism of the article is warranted, it is that the Times again fails to mention the earlier instances of Jordan's pattern of slandering the military. However, in its focus on blogs and their newfound strength, the article stands on its own as an excellent background piece and a welcome addition to the growing library on Eason's Fables.

For instance, Gallagher gets a good variety of reactions about the unexpected power of the bloggers that moved CNN to protect itself with Jordan's resignation. The article contains reactions from significant members of our community, and those responses demand answers:

But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned. ...

Steve Lovelady, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal and now managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, has been among the most outspoken.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," he lamented online after Mr. Jordan's resignation. He said that Mr. Jordan cared deeply about the reporters he had sent into battle and was "haunted by the fact that not all of them came back."

Some on line were simply trying to make sense of what happened. "Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?" asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, who says he works as an analyst in Austin, Tex. "Or does it mean that we've entered a brave new world where the MSM has become irrelevant," he asked, using blogger shorthand for mainstream media.

His own conclusion is that the mainstream media "is being held to account as never before by the strong force of individual citizens who won't settle for sloppy research and inflammatory comments without foundation, particularly from those with a wide national reach, such as Rather and Eason."

I had an opportunity to exchange e-mails with Steve Lovelady earlier today, and while the Times could not possibly have known this, his remarks suffer from the context. Our discussion wasn't quite under Chatham House Rules, but I don't want to quote him directly, either. I think I feel safe in saying that his intent did not include all bloggers who wrote critically about Eason Jordan, and he respects the efforts of some even while disagreeing about our take on the controversy. He should have a more complete reaction at CJR sometime soon.

Jeff Jarvis and Steve Lovelady echo what Jim Geraghty asked the blogosphere on February 9th:

I was exchanging emails with another blogger, Paul, who asked the good question, “Aside from "forcing" the resignation of Jordan, what is there to accomplish? Can CNN be shamed into behaving better?”

The question deserves some thought. What has the goal of the blogs in this case been? In the case of the CBS memos, it was pretty clear – to confirm suspicions that the memos were fake, and then squeeze a retraction out of a stubborn network digging in its heels.

A few flaws find their way into the piece. It misses entirely the crucial role played by Hugh Hewitt in generating the momentum in the blogosphere. It tends towards an implication that the blogswarm flew out of control, which I don't think is accurate. The article argues the same allegations that Eason Jordan now denies ever making, and it only presents one side, especially in regards to the death of two journalists at the Palestine Hotel. Jules Crittendon of the Baltimore Sun just rebutted the charges of deliberate murder or even of negligent disregard for safety, as he was embedded with the unit that fired on the hotel. It also mentions Nik Gowing, whom I referenced briefly in my interview with Gallagher, but doesn't mention the connection Gowing has with Jordan through CNNi president Chris Cramer, who has his own record of unsubstantiated allegations.

Of course, the Times has limited space in its print edition, and stories have to fit and sometimes suffer for the editing process. However, if these issues were to be brought up, I would have preferred to see their entire context.

Read the entire New York Times piece. It tends towards a warning to the blogosphere to take care not to go off half-cocked, and that may not be a bad message. At least as it pertains to my interview, I feel very well treated in the article and represented fairly, which gives me confidence that everyone else received equally fair treatment. The background will interest bloggers and non-bloggers alike and reminds us that we need to think about the terms of our mission.

NOTE: The Times also provides links back to the blogs it mentions. Nice touch; not all newspapers remember to do that.

UPDATE: Okay, here's one they missed. I updated this because I can't afford the price of silence any longer.

WEF: The Tapes Will Never Be Released

A CQ reader, Bekarach, contacted the World Economic Forum's Mark Adams about releasing the Davos forum videotape of Eason Jordan. Adams, head of media at the WEF, responded that Jordan's resignation effectively closes the issue of releasing the video:

Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2005 7:45 AM Subject: Re: Query - Will WEF release videotape/transcript Eason Jordan?

Firstly, apologies for not getting back to you earlier - I rather unwisely took a holiday after Davos, so havent been in the office 100 percent.

As you can appreciate we have to operate too under very strict rules regarding the Annual Meeting, and such a situation has never before arisen in 35 years of successful meetings at Davos.

More than half of the sessions that take place at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos are 'workshops' and interactive sessions, as was the case for the session attended by Mr Jordan. All participants take part in those sessions on the understanding that their comments are 'non-attributable' - that's to say that the general tenor of the session can be reported but not specific quotes. The more than 500 members of the media who attend the Annual Meeting are given these 'ground rules' before the start of the meeting, and more importantly everyone who takes part in a session as a speaker does so on these grounds.

Such rules, agreed by all who participate, allow for openness and even controversial debate, and I hope you can appreciate that it would be a breach of trust, not just to all the participants of this session - but of all such similar sessions at Davos - if we start releasing transcripts of what was said by each of the participants.

Since Mr Jordan has now resigned and is to all intents and purposes a private individual he has made it very clear what his position is. The availability or otherwise of a tape of the session in no way hinders discussion of this very serious topic, and i'm sure that will continue.

With Mr Jordan's resignation the debate will perhaps now shift from what he acutally said to the actual substance of the debate.

Mark Adams
Head of Media

"The actual substance of the debate" was what Jordan said, since he disputed the accounts of at least seven other witnesses to the forum. If Adams means that the debate should shift to the question of US policies of assassinating journalists, that would also confirm that Jordan lied in his valediction from CNN and his previous denials.

Further, the notion that transparency would breach the trust of a public forum is ludicrous. For one thing, there is serious question as to whether this particular forum even operated under those rules. If it did, why did the WEF videotape the entire forum? Rony Arbovitz and Rebecca MacKinnon have both stated that they did not understand that the forum was off the record. That rule applied by the room and not by the forum, and both have said that the room in which Eason Jordan spouted off was clearly understood not to be an off-the-record room.

Mark Adams does draw a conclusion from Jordan's resignation that the rest of the American media appears reluctant to reach, however. In making his position "very clear," the presumption Adams communicates is that Jordan knows what he said would seriously damage both himself and CNN, and his resignation is designed to avoid that. Too bad the WEF and Mark Adams will not allow the videotape to be publicly viewed so that we can skip the conjecture and make our own judgment about Eason Jordan's allegations.

UPDATE: For a forum which supposedly was off the record and where the rules supposedly prevented direct quotations, the WEF itself seems rather flexible about following its own regulations (hat tip: commenter Dishman):

Moderator David R. Gergen, Director, Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA, opened the session by suggesting that the trivialization of the press means that the public is becoming increasingly disengaged and is less inclined to vote. And because too much of the media is owned by corporations, much of the world isn’t being covered because of the costs.

Barney Frank, Congressman from Massachusetts (Democrat), USA, agreed. "Essentially there’s less news," he said. "Reporters used to come to the city hall and that is a thing of the past. The biggest change is in the corporate ownership. People used to put out newspapers because they wanted to be journalists. Nobody is doing that these days; they do it because they want to make money. Papers are in a circulation race."

The commercialization of the press is having its effect on the TV channels, too. Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive, CNN News Group, USA, said that his organization is under pressure to compete against entertainment-led cable outlets. For his part Richard Sambrook, Director, World Service and Global News, BBC World, United Kingdom, said that the suicide of David Kelly and the subsequent Hutton Report which criticized the BBC had resulted in a new commitment to the journalistic values of objectivity, transparency and accountability. "I think it’s going to become more important to divide the serious media from the others who are driving the bottom line," he said.

But Heaven forbid that the videotape taken of this "off-the-record" conference get released ....

Live-Blogging Reliable Sources

Howard Kurtz has a round-table on Eason's Fables on right now, and he has David Gergen, Bill Press, and Jeff Jarvis on to discuss the issue. I wasn't going to comment until it was over, but it's so ridiculous I have to live-blog it.

10:37 - Bill Press says that if General Mattis made similar remarks, no one would have cared. Is he out of his mind?

10:39 - Jeff Jarvis hotly disputes the notion that the blogosphere is a lynch mob. All we are, he said, are citizen journalists demanding the truth.

10:41 - Now they're talking about the Gannon/Guckert non-story. I note that Jeff tried to bring up Jordan's "history", but he got cut off by Howard Kurtz. I don't know if Jeff meant the other statements in 2004 and 2002 or his admission of selling out to Saddam in 2003.

10:45 - Kurtz cuts this short so they can fit in another discussion of "Deep Throat"? Now, that's breaking news!

(Note: Now that the main discussion is over, I will back the TiVo up and try to get exact quotes.)

3 minutes, DG: "He made a mistake, I did not think he deserved to lose his job over it. Look, a little context is important. He'd just come back from Baghdad, 16th trip. We were on the eve of elections there, he was extremely tense, because he thought a CNN journalist as well as other journalists were in grave danger there, and he was -- he praised US troops for protecting CNN journalists and others, but he said this was a place where we lost 63 journalists on all sides, and journalists on all sides are being -- are getting killed, often carelessly, and he used the word 'targeting'. He certainly left the impression that US troops were targeting journalists on the other side, al-Jazeera for example, just as insurgents were clearly targeting American journalists..."

Okay, this differs again from what Gergen told Michelle Malkin and Kurtz himself earlier, at least in the details. Now Gergen has Jordan praising the US for protecting CNN's reporters while only assassinating al-Jazeera reporters. It still amounts to the same charge -- that American soldiers deliberately killed civilians in combat knowing they were journalists, regardless of where they worked.

4 minutes, HK: "... Most news organizations didn't touch it. In fact, as far as I know, this is the first time it's being discussed CNN, which I think is a mistake, given Jordan's importance and all the airtime devoted to Dan Rather's problems --"

JJ: "Amen."

Exactly what we meant when we complained about the media blackout, although our ire focused more on Kurtz' role at the Washington Post. No one really expected CNN to cover the controversy, although it would have been nice to see that kind of independence by the network. Our main issue dealt with the same silence from ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and so on.

HK: "How did this reach critical mass?"

JJ: "Witness the news judgment of the people versus the news judgment of the big guys [a tad dramatic, Jeff? ;-)]. Really, the bloggers didn't want his head -- most of us didn't -- we wanted the truth. We want to see that transcript from Davos."

This whole notion of wanting Jordan's head or not wanting Jordan's head is ridiculous. Jarvis is correct that we wanted the truth about Davos, but we also already knew the truth about Portugal in November 2004 and the accusations against the Israeli military in October 2002, all made at journalistic conventions overseas, and none of them ever substantiated. We demanded transparency from CNN instead of obfuscation, and we demanded that their executives exercise objective news judgement instead of selling out America and its ally in order to curry favor with CNN's target markets of the same kleptocracies and tyrannies that support our enemies.

If Jordan had any evidence of these accusations being true, he should have had CNN raising the issues here, so that we could investigate them properly. His lack of effort to do so strongly indicates that Jordan told his fables to boost circulation and not out of any altruistic notions of protecting reporters or serving the truth. If he wanted to serve truth, all he needed to do was to call for the release of the videotape.

10 minutes, DG: "In this case, I have to say, Jeff, while there were bloggers who were simply getting at the truth, I think there was also a quality of vigilante justice building up among some of the bloggers who wanted his head."

JJ: "There were two issues with those bloggers. One was CNN's history with covering this war and the military in general, and the second was Jordan's own history here. And yes, there were some who don't like him and nothing would make them like him. But I wrote about this on my blog as a media story -- because it is. [Kurtz tries interrupting.] And I think the New York Times is embarassed about it because they didn't write about it beforehand."

That bolded portion was as close as anyone ever came to discussing Jordan's history of making similar allegations, with no substantiation, prior to Davos, which I have documented on my blog. Instead of focusing on the supposed vigilantism of the blogosphere, it would have been nice to see these supposedly professional journalists actually review all of the facts of the Eason Jordan case and provide the complete context for the controversy.

In other words, Kurtz has Kurtzed yet again.

Howard Kurtz Continues Kurtzing Eason's Fables

As the harbinger of the mainstream media treatment of the Eason Jordan scandal, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz continues to wear blinders to the overall context of Jordan's slanderous accusations. In his review of three blogosphere-related oustings over the past week, Kurtz again reports on Eason's Fables only in the narrowest sense, ignoring the other similar incidents that infuriated the blogosphere:

In the case of Jordan, a 23-year CNN veteran, it was a single online posting by technology executive Rony Abovitz, after Jordan's ill-fated comments at an off-the-record forum Jan. 27 in Davos, Switzerland, that led to his downfall. The lesson, say media analysts: In the digital age, anyone can be a journalist.

After Jordan told the forum that the U.S. military had targeted journalists -- and then backed away from the charge, though to what degree is very much in dispute -- he granted an interview only to The Washington Post, and CNN tried to minimize the matter with a terse statement. Jordan maintained that he was talking about accidental and possibly careless attacks on journalists in Iraq, where three CNN employees have been killed. But he compounded the problem, critics say, by not insisting that the World Economic Forum release a videotape of the session.

That's not inaccurate, but it's incomplete. As with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article below, it attempts to spin the problem as a single point of misunderstanding, followed by a mystifying cover-up. The consistent problem with Kurtz' reporting on this story is that he refuses to report on Jordan's earlier, similar statements, which provide a much different story about Eason Jordan.

One might excuse Kempner, who has no national reputation and may be rather new to the story -- although that hardly excuses shoddy research and reporting. However, media issues are Kurtz' beat, and he arguably is the most well-known and, until now at least, the most highly-regarded media critic in the US. Kurtz sets the tone, and his first three articles on Eason Jordan has certainly done that. Media outlets appear to have assumed the Kurtzian response of ignoring all but that which has been the most publicly known details.

We've seen mainstream media stars like Robert Fisk and Maureen Dowd inadvertently lend their names to disreputable journalism; in the former, just for biased and false reporting, and the latter for mangling quotes to significantly change their context for her own purposes. I propose the use of Kurtz as a verb meaning to provide cover for someone through the deliberately selective reporting of facts, just enough of which to protect the reporter against charges of falsification while accomplishing a purposeful misdirection. In this case, the Post has Kurtzed Eason's Fables into the appearance of a witch hunt, and look for more of the same at other outlets.