I spent much of last week out of town, so I didn’t follow the story of CNN news executive Eason Jordan’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Jordan said — or at least suggested — that U.S. forces had targeted journalists in Iraq. At the end of last week, under an onslaught of criticism from the righter-tilting segments of the blogosphere as well as criticism from other conservative media, Jordan resigned from CNN. When I caught up on the story over the weekend, it left me with a feeling of unease in a way that the whole controversy about the Dan-Rather-approved screwup at CBS had not. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page does not inspire agreement in me that often, seems to have articulated pretty well what bothered me. Here’s a relevant excerpt for those who don’t have WSJ.com access:

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.

But Easongate is not Rathergate. Mr. Rather and his CBS team perpetrated a fraud during a prime-time news broadcast; stood by it as it became obvious that the key document upon which their story was based was a forgery, and accused the whistleblowers of the very partisanship they themselves were guilty of. Mr. Rather still hasn’t really apologized.

… Yet the worst that can reasonably be said about [Jordan’s] 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.

As any reader of my book knows, I was applauding the ability of Internet-using citizens to correct the excesses of mainstream media back in the mid-1990s — notably in the exposure of Time magazine’s “Cyberporn” cover story as built on a fraud. So the role of bloggers in exposing where CBS and Rather went wrong (they too relied on a fraudster whom they should have checked out more thoroughly) struck me as essentially salutary.

But the available evidence about Eason Jordan’s remarks, as the Wall Street Journal makes clear, suggests neither that Jordan himself was perpetrating a fraud, nor that he was used as a conduit for one (which distinguishes him from Rather/CBS and Time). What seems to be the case, to judge from the New York Times followup story, is that Jordan is deeply concerned about the deaths of journalists in such events as the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Maybe that concern made him misspeak, and maybe it didn’t, but it doesn’t seem to be the case that he was part of any deliberate fraud.

P.S., For what it’s worth, I disagree with the WSJ editorial on one issue — I do think this counts as an apology from Dan Rather.

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