The Truth About Jordan

You know, they just don't get it.

Eason Jordan's resignation is a big story. And the mainstream media (MSM) is willing to cover it, albeit with a twist that we'll discuss in a moment. But his comments at the Davos conference, which provided the reason for his departure from CNN, received little in the way of coverage from the MSM. Even the news outlet that had the story originally, the Wall Street Journal, thought that this wasn't a story, and still felt that way Monday when it penned this rather odd editorial...

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.

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.

More troubling to us is that Mr. Jordan seems to have "resigned," if in fact he wasn't forced out, for what hardly looks like a hanging offense. It is true that Mr. Jordan has a knack for indefensible remarks, including a 2003 New York Times op-ed in which he admitted that CNN had remained silent about Saddam's atrocities in order to maintain its access in Baghdad. That really was a firing offense. But CNN stood by Mr. Jordan back then--in part, one suspects, because his confession implicated the whole news organization. Now CNN is throwing Mr. Jordan overboard for this much slighter transgression, despite faithful service through his entire adult career.

In the end, I don't agree with the idea that this wasn't newsworthy, or that Jordan didn't deserve to be canned. But those are opinions, not the facts themselves. The facts show that the chief news executive at CNN made an apparently slanderous comment about the U.S. military, and retracted it in some part when asked to substantiate it, during a conference attended by a number of journalists. To decide that this is not newsworthy seems fantastic to me, but I guess it's one point of view.

But the fact that the MSM seemed to hold this view as a whole seems to reflect a level of groupthink that's pretty damning. The blogs didn't make this into a story out of thin air -- they wrote about it and other blogs picked it up, and the story drew attention from those who read it, who began to talk about it and wonder why the story wasn't on the evening news or in their daily paper. In the end, some folks probably could care less about this story, while others think it's a huge story. That reflects a differnece of opinion, but it should be alarming to the MSM that it collectively deemed it "non-news" with nary a peep. I don't know that we need news networks to cater entirely to our viewing or reading habits, but I also don't believe that a group of journalistic elites should decide what people should or should not know.

What's even more ridiculous than the WSJ's point of view on Jordan's actual comments is the hilariously alarmed response of the MSM to the Jordan resignation. Most of the focus from the MSM has now moved onto the issue of whether Jordan was forced to leave by a bunch of bloodthirsty barbarian bloggers storming the regal news citadel of CNN. The Lovelady quote I posted earlier this week reflects it...

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail. (Where is Jimmy Stewart when we need him ?) This convinces me more than ever that Eason Jordan is guilty of one thing, and one thing only -- caring for the reporters he sent into battle, and haunted by the fact that not all of them came back. Like Gulliver, he was consumed by Lilliputians."

Maybe it says a lot that he doesn't know where Jimmy Stewart is. Okay, just kidding. But Eugene Volokh has a reasoned response that tears apart Lovelady's logic and provides a far better definition for the blogosphere...

Now I realize that "lynch mob" is figurative, and hyperbole at that. Still, figurative references and analogies (even hyperbolic ones) only make sense to the extent that the analogy is apt -- to the extent that the figurative usage, while literally false, reflects a deeper truth.

The trouble is that here the analogy is extremely weak. What's wrong with lynch mobs? It's that the mob itself has the power to kill. They could be completely wrong, and entirely unpersuasive to reasonable people or to the rest of the public. Yet by their physical power, they can impose their will without regard to the law.

But bloggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. Jordan's resignation didn't come because he was afraid that bloggers will fire him. They can't fire him. I assume that to the extent the bloggers' speech led him to resign, it did so by persuading the public that he wasn't trustworthy.

So Jordan's critics (bloggers or not) aren't a lynch mob: If they're a mob, they're at most a "persuasion mob." What's more, since they're generally a very small group, they're really a "persuasion bunch."

Maybe if a persuasion bunch tries to persuade people by using factual falsehoods, they could be faulted on those grounds (though that too has little to do with lynch mobs). But I've seen no evidence that their criticisms were factually unfounded, or that Jordan quit because of any factual errors in the criticisms. (Plus presumably releasing the video of the panel would have been the best way to fight the factual errors.)

We should love persuasion bunches, who operate through peaceful persuasion, while hating lynch mobs, who operate through violence and coercion. What's more, journalists -- to the extent that they love the First Amendment's premise that broad public debate helps discover the truth, and improve society -- ought to love persuasion bunches, too. When the only power you wield is the power to speak, and persuade others through the force of your arguments (and not through the force of your guns, clubs, or fists), that's just fine. Come to think of it, isn't that the power that opinion journalists themselves wield?

It's too bad Mike Moran at "Hardblogger" didn't read this before making a fool of himself...

While it remains unclear if Jordan jumped or was pushed from his Atlantan heights, what is clear is that CNN is a lesser place without him, and the quality of political debate in the United States will likely deteriorate further, as well.

And what of his “crime?” With all the interest in “truth” shown by the Gang of Four, unabashedly partisan bloggers browbeat CNN's senior editorial figure into resigning because of a controversial (but hardly blasphemous) statement he made during in an off-the-record journalism panel. He allegedly (that's a word that we used in journalism to imply that we're not so damned sure of everything) asserted during the Davos panel that the American military had deliberately targeted journalists during the Iraq war.

That probably sounds outrageous to the public, who, thanks to the bang up job the mainstream media has done reporting what happened in Iraq, know little about the still unresolved questions surrounding the precision bombing of al-Jazeera's offices during the war, or the tank rounds fired into the hotel that housed the international press corps in Baghdad.

Here's the problem with Moran -- he's basically blaming the MSM for failing to report facts that would substantiate Jordan's alleged claim, and believes the bloggers brought about his downfall. If Jordan's comments were not as bad as people such as Barney Frank and Rony Abovitz have claimed, he (and CNN) should have forced the WEF to release the videotape. If he believed his comments were correct, he should have stood by them and substantiated them -- because if his claim is true, that's a huge news story, no matter what these terrible partisan bloggers think.

As for the quality of political debate deteriorating, I love snobby comments like this that miss the point of the blogosphere, talk radio and cable news programming. Political debate has always been nasty; the only difference now is that more people participate in it. There's no high cabal of journalists and politicians deciding what the masses should or should not know about the government and the news surrounding it. That makes our system more democratic. And I'd argue that more information is better than less -- there may be more disinformation out there, but there's more sources available to disprove false stories. Hey, who knows if CBS faked any stories back in the days before the Internet?

Perhaps the Lord of Truth put it best in an e-mail to me...

Seems to me that the Establishment Media is angry that they are finally being held accountable by the viewing public. It's like their reaction is "What, we suddenly can't make unfoudned statements and provide stories with no backing evidence?"

Perhaps this will motivate news organizations to actually pursue news stories and real journalism, rather than just going for ratings and sensationalism. Yeah, right. Like that will happen.

It will probably do both, eventually. And the new media will keep them straight until then.