Takedown

The bloggy masses put another head on the wall. Eason Jordan is history...

CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits
DAVID BAUDERAssociated Press

NEW YORK - CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy.

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted. He quickly backed off the remarks, explaining that he meant to distinguish between journalists killed because they were in the wrong place where a bomb fell, for example, and those killed because they were shot at by American forces who mistook them for the enemy.

"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise," Jordan said in a memo to fellow staff members at CNN.
But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up.

There was an online petition calling on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists.

Let the obscenely triumphal chest-beating begin.

Actually, I'm not sure I feel good about this. Sure, Jordan is a left-wing twit, but that's OK with me. With the decline of the major networks and the proliferation of cable it's quite alright to have an Eason Jordan and a Roger Ailes to balance each other. With all the communications channels out there, the internet, talk and news radio, and cable it's not as if we were suffering a dearth of news coverage. Sure the pretense of objectivity is hypocritical, but unlike many in America, I don't see hypocrisy as being all that bad. It is important to affirm standards, even if you have trouble living up to them. Maybe it would be best simply to attach a tag to the networks as in CNN [left of center], FOX [right of center] MSNBC [schizoid] etc.