Month: February 2005

Dear Mr. Jordan,
While I appreciate your response, I find it singularly inadequate. Just in terms of the one incident in Davos, your characterization of the debate fails to match with the two independent sources we have already seen. The first source, Forumblog, tells us that your forum was videotaped. Where is the transcript? Why don’t you simply produce that, or a videotape on CNN, with the portion of your statement? Surely CNN has the resources to track the tape down. The fact that your own news service fails to make that information available causes me to discount your characterization.
Unfortunately, even had I been inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt about Davos, you have a clear pattern of speaking abroad to audiences inclined towards anti-Western sentiment and making unsubstantiated charges against the US and Israel. You also need to explain your statements in the following venues:
November 2004 – You asserted that US military forces illegally detained 10 or more journalists and subjected them to torture. You said that you based this allegation on reports you’d seen which you believe to be true. Why didn’t CNN publish these reports? Where are they now? Which journalists were tortured, and by whom? It’s been almost four months since you made these charges, Mr. Jordan, and we have seen nothing from CNN.
October 2002 – You claimed that Israeli forces had a policy of targeting journalists, alleging that they had deliberately shot a CNN reporter as a result:

We’re not trying to favour one side over the other we’re not going to pull any punches in our reporting but the truth hurts sometimes and it hurts both sides but it’s a mistake to target the news media. We’ve had enormous frustrations in having access to occupied areas of the West Bank and Israeli forces on a number of occasions have shot at CNN personnel and in fact did shoot one CNN correspondent, he was badly wounded. The Israelis say they’re actually trying to restrict our access to these areas and they say it’s too dangerous for you to be there and my response to that is that it wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if you didn’t shoot at us when we’re clearly labelled as CNN crews and journalists. And so this must stop, this targeting of the news media both literally and figuratively must come to an end immediately.

The only CNN journalist wounded in that region was Ben Wedeman, who got shot when he wandered into a crossfire. Your own producer, Bruce Conover, told CNN that no one could tell who shot him, as the bullets and mortars were flying in from all directions. Again, you provided no specifics, no names, and no substantiation whatsoever for the notion that the IDF deliberately targets journalists. Again, you made these statements in a foreign country where your remarks were likely to get less scrutiny in the US and approbation from the people who dislike America and Americans. And I note, once again, that CNN never reported on any special program to target journalists in combat zones, despite your allegations. We can only conclude from this that your rhetoric was immature, irresponsible, and completely unsubstantiated — again.
Until you can account for the Davos transcript so that we can all see the context of your remarks and explain your prevarications in the above two egregious examples of slander, then you have no credibility and neither does the news organization which takes its orders from you. Your position as the head of a major news organization and as a journalist requires you to be responsible for your words and actions. You have proven yourself to be inadequate to that task and disrespectful of the truth, and as such, you should resign immediately. As long as you remain in charge of CNN, nothing they report will have any credibility.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Carol Platt Liebau has Eason Jordan’s official response, which she got by working through mutual acquaintances. Jordan maintains that he never said that the US deliberately targeted journalists:

“To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq. I said so during the forum panel discussion. But, nonetheless, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity. The reason the word “targeted” came up at all is because I was responding to a comment by Congressman Franks, who said he believed the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were the victims of “collateral damage.” Since three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq, I disputed the “collateral damage” statement, saying, unfortunately, many journalists — not all — killed in Iraq were indeed targeted. When someone aims a gun at someone and pulls the trigger and then learns later the person fired at was actually a journalist, an apology is appropriate and is accepted, and I believe those apologies to be genuine. But such a
killing is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a case of “collateral damage.” That is the distinction I was trying to make even if I did not make it clearly at the time. Further, I have worked closely with the U.S. military for months in an effort to achieve a mutual goal: keeping journalists in Iraq safe and alive.”

I’ll post my response separately, but big thanks to Carol Platt Liebau for getting Eason Jordan to finally comment personally and directly.
Addendum: Does anyone else notice that Carol scooped CNN on this development?

In yet another example of how Eason Jordan tosses around accusations without much supporting evidence — or any at all — the Guardian (UK) covering the News Xchange Forum this past November reports on accusations of the torture of journalists by American forces (hat tip – Peter Cook):

Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, said there had been only a “limited amount of progress”, despite repeated meetings between news organisations and the US authorities.
“Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces,” Mr Jordan told an audience of news executives at the News Xchange conference in Portugal.

Once again, we go to CNN’s own archives to find any report that mentions Jordan and the torture of reporters by any military whatsoever … and find nothing. Where are those reports which Eason Jordan believes to be true? Why didn’t CNN cover such a blockbuster story? Jordan appears to have a big mouth and a strong desire to tell people stories — let’s call them Eason’s Fables — that get him attention from all the right people.
If you have had enough of Eason Jordan, don’t tell CNN. Go to Time Warner and let them know.
UPDATE: Bumping this to the top — this is a solid corroboration of Jordan’s inherent bias and antagonism towards the American military.
UPDATE II: Charles at Little Green Footballs notes that Jordan was not the only CNN exec to make accusations of targeting at this conference:

And please note: *this is not limited to Eason Jordan.* At the same News Xchange conference in Portugal, -another- CNN executive, Chris Cramer, told an audience that journalists were being “deliberately targeted for seeking out the truth.”

Good catch — I missed that one.

Hey, folks, guess what I just received in my e-mail?

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan’s remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions.
Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of “collateral damage.”

I posted this earlier, as TKS had received it after sending CNN a complaint by e-mail. However, I never did send CNN an e-mail — and this message was e-mailed to me specifically, with my address in the To: field.
Do you think someone at CNN might be a tad worried?
UPDATE 6:11 PM CT: Still no evidence of any response at CNN’s website.
UPDATE II: I’ll be on Hugh Hewitt around 6:45 PM CT to discuss the story.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a TV reporter as well as a blogger, somewhat reluctantly confirms the account given in Forumblog about Eason Jordan’s remarks in Davos last week (hat tip TKS). MacKinnon writes in her blog, RConversations:

I was in the room and Rony’s account is consistent with what I heard. I was also contributing to the Forumblog, but to be honest, Jordan happens to be my former boss who promoted me and defended me in some rather sticky situations after my reporting angered the Chinese government. As CNN’s “senior statesman” over the years, Eason has done some things I agreed with and other things I wondered about. But at least when it came to China, he was no apologist and defended my reports on human rights abuses and political dissent.

Actually, I find Ms. MacKinnon’s loyalties to both the truth and her former boss admirable. It’s obvious that she thought carefully before posting this corroboration of Forumblog’s account.
Now CNN has more explaining to do. After sending out that CYA response, the obvious whitewash attempt instead shows the cable network circling the wagons, a la Rather and the gang at Black Rock last September. Eason Jordan wants to bet the future of CNN on outlasting his critics with smokescreens and arguments about context. Obviously, he didn’t pay much attention to the Memogate fiasco; I wonder if Time Warner will make the same mistake Viacom did.
NOTE: LaShawn Barber is tracking the blog swarm, with lots of links.

In October 2002, Eason Jordan claimed that the Israeli Defensive Forces had shot a CNN reporter as part of a deliberate strategy of targeting journalists covering the war in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (see post below). I did a little searching on Nexis again, confident that had CNN reporters taken fire in the line of duty, CNN would report it. I conducted a search for ‘CNN reporter shot’ (non-exclusive), and I got only five hits, all of which reported the same incident, which occurred on October 31, 2000.
According to CNN’s own coverage of the incident and their own eyewitness to the event, Eason Jordan lied about it during the October 2002 conference:

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Violence in the Middle East has been increasing over the past few days. The death toll is rising.
At least, 151 people have been killed in the clashes, and today the CNN family was directly hit. Correspondent Ben Wedeman was shot just hours ago as he was covering the clashes between Palestinians and Israelis.
Ben is being treated at a hospital in Gaza City. His producer, Bruce Conover, joins us by phone now from Shifa (ph) Hospital.
Bruce, thanks for joining us.
BRUCE CONOVER, CNN PRODUCER: Hi, Daryn. Well, Ben’s fine. He’s conscious. He’s making jokes. So we’re feeling a lot better about his condition right now.
KAGAN: So he’s going to be OK.
CONOVER: He’s going to be OK, yes.
KAGAN: Can you tell us what happened?
CONOVER: He — we had Ben and a cameraman, Dave Albritten (ph), coming in as a new team. They’ve been here a few times before. But obviously, you need to bring people up to speed on the locations, where these clashes have been taking place.
So we decided to go to a place that is called the Karni Junction. It’s basically a commercial trade center across the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, where literally trucks with Israeli license plates unload into trucks with Palestinian plates so that there are no vehicles crossing the border.
That location was — became a point of fairly nasty clashes two days ago when there were heavy machine guns in use. The Israeli army said that they were fired upon from Palestinian positions. During the period that we were there, we did not hear any return fire until the very last moment.
But today, it turned violent very quickly. We got there, and literally, a huge firefight broke out. We were — there were four of us there. We were literally pinned to the ground a minute and a half after getting out of the car. And we were pinned down — Ben and cameraman Mohammed (ph) were a little bit ahead. They were in a grove of olive trees, and we saw an Israeli tank shelling and moving the shells — walking the shells toward the olive grove. It became very clear that it was critical that they get out of there. Mohammed yelled to Ben to get out. They were in the process of trying to move when Ben was hit by something. We’re still not sure exactly what.
But he was hit. He went down. Mohammed got out of there. Ben was lying on the ground. And in sort of an ironic testimonial to high technology, we, completely pinned down, used our cell phones to call Ben to find out whether he was hit, and in fact, he said, yes, I’m hit, at which point there were several ambulances that were — had been called by bystanders to the area.
But it was a very nasty firefight, with shelling, probably an exchange of gunfire. It’s hard to tell from which side, but there was definitely a lot of stuff coming across. And to make a long story a little bit shorter, it came out of nowhere.
This location, we’ve been there the day before, absolutely calm, or I should say relatively calm, the normal clashes: Israeli forces using rubber bullets, Palestinians throwing rocks. That’s sort of encompassing the norm.

So what happened? CNN’s reporter went to an area where clashes were known to occur; a reasonable action for a reporter to take. Usually the clashes didn’t amount to anything particularly intense. On this occasion, however, a full-scale battle with real bullets erupted, and Wedeman got caught in the crossfire. No one knows who shot him — after all, CNN didn’t follow up the report according to Nexis — and his bullet was just as likely to have come from a Palestinian gun as an IDF gun. More to the point, no one “targeted” Wedeman for assassination. Someone may have mistaken him as a combatant, but it’s much more likely that he simply got stuck in the wrong place in a battlefield.
With reporting like this coming from the chief of CNN, how can we trust anything his underlings tell us?
UPDATE: Glenn corrected my English in the intro — and I used to be a technical writer/editor whose job it was to catch that stuff. Dang — writing on a lunch break will do that to a guy! But if I get to hear from Glenn, it’s worth it.

Eason Jordan appears to like spreading the slander around when it comes to accusations of assassination attempts by Western military forces. CQ reader and blogger Peter Cook found this forum transcript from News Xchange 2002, where Jordan makes the same accusations — with the same lack of specifics — against the Israelis:

NG: Eason, why do you think you’ve been targeted specifically, I mean there are Israeli bumper stickers that say ‘CNN lies’, the Israeli communications minister talked about CNN as being ‘evil, biased and unbalanced’ you’ll be familiar with all these quotes?
EJ: Absolutely, well the Israeli government is making a mistake if it considers CNN the enemy, CNN is just trying to tell the story of Israel, the story of Palestinian areas in a straightforward way. We’re not trying to favour one side over the other we’re not going to pull any punches in our reporting but the truth hurts sometimes and it hurts both sides but it’s a mistake to target the news media. We’ve had enormous frustrations in having access to occupied areas of the West Bank and Israeli forces on a number of occasions have shot at CNN personnel and in fact did shoot one CNN correspondent, he was badly wounded. The Israelis say they’re actually trying to restrict our access to these areas and they say it’s too dangerous for you to be there and my response to that is that it wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if you didn’t shoot at us when we’re clearly labelled as CNN crews and journalists. And so this must stop, this targeting of the news media both literally and figuratively must come to an end immediately.

Who got shot? When and where did this happen? Jordan doesn’t say. Again, if CNN has evidence that the Israelis target journalists for assassination, why haven’t they reported the story? And if they don’t have any proof of Jordan’s allegations, why does he toss them around so carelessly? Either Jordan is a raging paranoid or has political reasons for his allegations. Given his past, I’d lean more towards the latter.
Having a man at the top of a major news organization engaging in this kind of conduct destroys the credibility of the entire organization. Perhaps we in the blogosphere have been slow to check Eason Jordan, but we’re conscious of the problem now and we will continue to push this story as long as the mainstream news media continues to ignore it. If Jordan has proof of these multiple accusations, let’s see it. If not, Time Warner should fire him immediately.
UPDATE: CNN has released a statement via e-mail to those who have written in (hat tip: TKS):

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan’s remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions.
Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of “collateral damage.”

First off, it’s interesting to note that CNN responded to blogs here, not just readers or viewers. But it hardly answers the question of what actually was said. It sounds like Jordan disagreed with the notion that all 63 journalists were killed as a result of collateral damage. So what did Jordan claim as the cause?
Better yet, why did Eason Jordan accuse the Israelis of the exact same thing — targeted assassinations — without providing any specifics or evidence? This release means nothing except a quick attempt to avoid a blogswarm. Nice try, but no cigar, pals.