the eason jordan story
The Eason Jordan story is a strange one.
Some richly endowed organization decided to invite prominent people from all over the world to an all expense paid week-long boondoggle in Davos, Switzerland, a posh ski-resort in the Alps.
All sorts of folk were invited and many accepted. The meeting consisted of many discussion sections, on all sorts of issues, great food, great accommodations and some opportunities to ski.
Eason Jordan (a high official at CNN), Chris Dodd, the Senator from Connecticut, Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Representative, David Gergen, and many many others attended, and in particular attended a session that somehow concerned reporting in Iraq and its dangers.
Some one, in a talk or discussion, noted that some 65 journalists (or reasonable facsimiles to journalists) have been killed in Iraq in recent years, even without actually being targeted.
Eason Jordan knew better than that. Jordan has gone on record to state that when Saddam Hussein was in power, CNN suppressed news unfavorable to him, to avoid having its employees harmed by his minions, or expelled from the country. And CNN profited mightily from this policy, which led to the famous Arnett reports from Bagdad during the first Gulf War.
But not everyone approves of this policy. It is natural that given a conflict between sides A and B, in which representatives of side A will kill you or yours if you report the truth, and side B gives you the freedom to publish anything, you will be tempted to bend the news in the direction of side A out of mere prudence. The downside is that by doing so you become an agent of side A and a coconspirator with A in suppressing truth and flogging propaganda for side A.
Thus, by going down this path, a news agency becomes a partisan, and in most cases a partisan of terrorism. After a while the agency becomes a recognized partner in terror and carries around with it the stench of Hades. Reuters and the BBC have wallowed in this role in reportage from Israel and Palestine. CNN has been the biggest representative of this path in Iraq.
Perhaps Eason has a conscience, and has depressed even himself with his pro-terrorist policies. In any case it obviously has weighed heavily on his mind that his ‘journalists’ can be and are targeted by terrorists, and his own people would be targets if his policy of serving terrorists was changed.
So when he heard someone claim that the 65 deaths did not involve targeting, he objected. (Think of it this way: if those deaths were all mere accidents, and neither side targeted anyone, his entire policy, his Hellish odor, was sprayed on himself for no reason at all.)
He felt he had to say that terrorists do target journalists that disagree with them or publish truths about them. But as he said it he realized to himself that his very statement violates his own rule! To say that the terrorists target journalists is of course to state the truth, but will that not cost him a murdered reporter or two?
In mid claim Eason saw that he had to neutralize or defuse his comment before it exploded in the face of one of his agents.
So he embellished, claiming that both sides targeted journalists. The terrorists could be miffed about the truth concerning them, but they would be placated by his calumny against the United States.
Alas, his audience included few terrorists, and several Americans, who were fascinated by his charges. They asked for evidence for our targeting journalists, and demanded details. I suppose that Eason had assumed that his audience was friendly and would accept his remarks without question.
Since the Americans in question were Democrats, and rather leftish Democrats at that, this did not seem an unreasonable assumption.
A Republican might guess that Frank and Dodd pushed on Eason in the hopes of his revealing some new Abu Ghraib-like incident that they could use to launch a new attack on Bush and his policies. But for whatever reason, pursue him they did, and poor Eason was forced to defend his weird balancing afterthought, which was something he could not do.
Eason was on the horns of a dilemma; he could take back his comment and risk his hard earned (and dishonorably earned) reputation as an agent of terrorism; or hold to it blindly and stubbornly. He tried the latter, but failed.
All he could come up with is the claim that a soldier had kicked one of his reporters off a line waiting to do something or other, because he didn’t like his (pro-terrorist?) report on something. It does seem a bit of a stretch to call that purposely killing an individual because he is a journalist. So Eason satisfied nobody at all.
And that would have been that. Few in the audience cared much about the exchange. An American reporter invited to the conference who has recently worked in Israel (Stephens) found Eason’s comment no different from standard news service nonsense about Israel and was unimpressed by the whole thing, as he commented in the Wall Street Journal.
And then a very strange thing happened. Though there was essentially no significant press coverage of the incident, the story began to circulate on the internet and recirculate and reverberate and soon millions of Americans became aware of it. And they could become aware in remarkable depth. The quoted comments of Dodd and Frank and Gergen and Stephens were parsed and picked on in detail; details of each of the 65 cases of dead journalists were published. Eason’s former comments about his willing subservience to Saddam Hussein, the obvious pro-terrorist bias in current CNN reports, and echoes of the prostitution of the New York Times reporter (Duranty) during the 1930’s famine in the Ukraine appeared. There was an illustrated blog about an attractive female employee of CNN who, it was said, had been singled out for perhaps unwanted attention by certain members of the US military. After a week or two even the press began to notice.
And just then, Eason resigned from CNN!
Poor Eason! If he had been quizzed by Republicans he could have called it McCarthyism. If Stephens and the Wall Street Journal had piled on he could have inveighed against pro-Israel bias. But he was done in by left-wing Democrats, and treated kindly, if truthfully, by Stephens!
He never conceived that falsely accusing Bush’s myrmidons of misdeeds in front of left-wing Democrats is like bleeding in front of a shark. They will rip you to pieces trying to extract an impeachable truth from you. Let that be a lesson to you.
Some richly endowed organization decided to invite prominent people from all over the world to an all expense paid week-long boondoggle in Davos, Switzerland, a posh ski-resort in the Alps.
All sorts of folk were invited and many accepted. The meeting consisted of many discussion sections, on all sorts of issues, great food, great accommodations and some opportunities to ski.
Eason Jordan (a high official at CNN), Chris Dodd, the Senator from Connecticut, Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Representative, David Gergen, and many many others attended, and in particular attended a session that somehow concerned reporting in Iraq and its dangers.
Some one, in a talk or discussion, noted that some 65 journalists (or reasonable facsimiles to journalists) have been killed in Iraq in recent years, even without actually being targeted.
Eason Jordan knew better than that. Jordan has gone on record to state that when Saddam Hussein was in power, CNN suppressed news unfavorable to him, to avoid having its employees harmed by his minions, or expelled from the country. And CNN profited mightily from this policy, which led to the famous Arnett reports from Bagdad during the first Gulf War.
But not everyone approves of this policy. It is natural that given a conflict between sides A and B, in which representatives of side A will kill you or yours if you report the truth, and side B gives you the freedom to publish anything, you will be tempted to bend the news in the direction of side A out of mere prudence. The downside is that by doing so you become an agent of side A and a coconspirator with A in suppressing truth and flogging propaganda for side A.
Thus, by going down this path, a news agency becomes a partisan, and in most cases a partisan of terrorism. After a while the agency becomes a recognized partner in terror and carries around with it the stench of Hades. Reuters and the BBC have wallowed in this role in reportage from Israel and Palestine. CNN has been the biggest representative of this path in Iraq.
Perhaps Eason has a conscience, and has depressed even himself with his pro-terrorist policies. In any case it obviously has weighed heavily on his mind that his ‘journalists’ can be and are targeted by terrorists, and his own people would be targets if his policy of serving terrorists was changed.
So when he heard someone claim that the 65 deaths did not involve targeting, he objected. (Think of it this way: if those deaths were all mere accidents, and neither side targeted anyone, his entire policy, his Hellish odor, was sprayed on himself for no reason at all.)
He felt he had to say that terrorists do target journalists that disagree with them or publish truths about them. But as he said it he realized to himself that his very statement violates his own rule! To say that the terrorists target journalists is of course to state the truth, but will that not cost him a murdered reporter or two?
In mid claim Eason saw that he had to neutralize or defuse his comment before it exploded in the face of one of his agents.
So he embellished, claiming that both sides targeted journalists. The terrorists could be miffed about the truth concerning them, but they would be placated by his calumny against the United States.
Alas, his audience included few terrorists, and several Americans, who were fascinated by his charges. They asked for evidence for our targeting journalists, and demanded details. I suppose that Eason had assumed that his audience was friendly and would accept his remarks without question.
Since the Americans in question were Democrats, and rather leftish Democrats at that, this did not seem an unreasonable assumption.
A Republican might guess that Frank and Dodd pushed on Eason in the hopes of his revealing some new Abu Ghraib-like incident that they could use to launch a new attack on Bush and his policies. But for whatever reason, pursue him they did, and poor Eason was forced to defend his weird balancing afterthought, which was something he could not do.
Eason was on the horns of a dilemma; he could take back his comment and risk his hard earned (and dishonorably earned) reputation as an agent of terrorism; or hold to it blindly and stubbornly. He tried the latter, but failed.
All he could come up with is the claim that a soldier had kicked one of his reporters off a line waiting to do something or other, because he didn’t like his (pro-terrorist?) report on something. It does seem a bit of a stretch to call that purposely killing an individual because he is a journalist. So Eason satisfied nobody at all.
And that would have been that. Few in the audience cared much about the exchange. An American reporter invited to the conference who has recently worked in Israel (Stephens) found Eason’s comment no different from standard news service nonsense about Israel and was unimpressed by the whole thing, as he commented in the Wall Street Journal.
And then a very strange thing happened. Though there was essentially no significant press coverage of the incident, the story began to circulate on the internet and recirculate and reverberate and soon millions of Americans became aware of it. And they could become aware in remarkable depth. The quoted comments of Dodd and Frank and Gergen and Stephens were parsed and picked on in detail; details of each of the 65 cases of dead journalists were published. Eason’s former comments about his willing subservience to Saddam Hussein, the obvious pro-terrorist bias in current CNN reports, and echoes of the prostitution of the New York Times reporter (Duranty) during the 1930’s famine in the Ukraine appeared. There was an illustrated blog about an attractive female employee of CNN who, it was said, had been singled out for perhaps unwanted attention by certain members of the US military. After a week or two even the press began to notice.
And just then, Eason resigned from CNN!
Poor Eason! If he had been quizzed by Republicans he could have called it McCarthyism. If Stephens and the Wall Street Journal had piled on he could have inveighed against pro-Israel bias. But he was done in by left-wing Democrats, and treated kindly, if truthfully, by Stephens!
He never conceived that falsely accusing Bush’s myrmidons of misdeeds in front of left-wing Democrats is like bleeding in front of a shark. They will rip you to pieces trying to extract an impeachable truth from you. Let that be a lesson to you.
posted by daniel at 2:31 PM
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