Breaking news via Drudge – after nearly two weeks of blogosphere driven pressure to keep the story alive, CNN’s Eason Jordan has finally resigned;
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.
Early reaction from Powerline, who predicted on Feb.7th that “Eason Jordan is finished”;
I don’t know, of course, what tipped the balance, but I wonder whether it might have been this: Larry Kudlow’s interview with three influential Senators, George Allen, Jeffrey Sessions and Norm Coleman, all of whom knew about the story, in contrast with many “mainstream” reporters who have been asked about it in recent days, and were incensed by it. This detail may have been telling:
Senator Coleman was not ready to open up an investigation, but he indicated it was worth looking at.
Senator Coleman is, of course, the Chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Larry notes that these and other Senators had to get their awareness of the Jordan affair through blogs.
James Joyner has been compiling a list of blogger response.
update
Howard Kurtz finally writes the column he should have the first time round, though still highly sympathetic to his co-worker at CNN.
The Time Warner board didn’t wish to follow Viacom’s egregious example of corporate governance? Golly, what will Howie Kurtz say on Sunday? LOL
Resigned? Doesn’t anybody get fired anymore?
Death to the Talking Heads: The Implosion of the Main Stream Media
Today, Eason Jordan of CNN was forced to resign. Barely a month ago, CBS fired or asked to resgin Mary Mapes, Betsy West, Josh Howard, Mary Murphy, Mary Mapes, and Dan Rather, after the blogs pointed out that they were using forged documents.
People are tired of being fed liberal inuendo and half-truths by the talking heads under the false guise of objectivity. Main Stream Media, as we know it, is dead. They just don’t know it yet.
The bloggers are evaluating every story in the world, and, once a story catches on in the blogs, moving with inconceivable speed in all directions. In short, the MSM is facing the most perfect journalistic system ever conceived in the history of the world, and they think that they’re up against a bunch of pajama clad hacks. (I don’t even wear pajamas. 😉
So, turn off your television. Cancel your subscription to that dead-tree newspaper. And welcome to the world of real, honest journalism.
http://www.peeniewallie.com
Related to the “Implosion of Mainstream Media,” there’s a rambling article by Michael Wolff in the March 2005 edition of Vanity Fair entitled “Twilight of the News.”
Wolff puffs along for two and a half magazine pages on the demise of network news, Dan Rather’s parting and so on, etc., etc., blah blah…
Tellingly, throughout the entire article, there’s not a single mention of the Internet or blogging.
BLOGGER HEADLINES — EasonGate:
Bloggers send Eason Jordan to the bench They Shoot Journalists, Update: Self Inflicted Bloggers Nail Another Skin to the Wall Let me be the First: Gutless PUSSY! Ding Dong, Eason…
You are so right! its just like this jeff gannon guy from talon news getting to near president bush and sactually getting secret CIA documents as a memeber of the press corp and then it turns out gannon isnt even his name and he runs a bunch of gay military porn sights like http://www.hotmilitarystud.com. I mean this guy got close enough to touch president bush with his aids infested hands. wtf is going on in the press these days?
Actually, no, “John Johnson”, it’s not like that at all. The mainstream media jumped all over that story, despite the fact that the so-called porn sites existed in domain name only. (My system administrator used to “own” my domain, and did so for years).
Eason Jordan had his ass covered for as long as they could hold off, and today, there’s still hardly a peep on what should be a major news story.
Main Stream Media: A Requiem for the New Age
The beauty of the blogs is that no one owns them, and the aren’t conrolled by any single power, at least at this point. They don’t clearly fall under the direction of the FCC or the FBI or the DEA or the NTSB. As such, they’re basically the embodiment of the “free press” our founding fathers originally advocated. They warned against “licensing of the press”, which is, of course, the sole purpose of the FCC and the NPA of 1970. The blogs wouldn’t be important, if it weren’t for the collosal consolidation of thought that has occurred in the Main Stream Media(MSM). Specifically:
Newspapers – Most large U.S. cities are single-paper-cities. Legal monopolies (technicllay Joint Opperating Agreements) allowed by ill-conceived Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970). No competition of ideas in the editorial department. If you don’t agree with me, you won’t work here. Next.
Radio Stations – A massive consolidation of radio stations is undeniable, and bad for the medium. Clear Channel owns something absurd like 60% of all radio programming in the United States. So, if your thoughts disagree with theirs, you’re not likely to be heard on the radio any time soon.
Television – Ditto with the radio stations. Massive consolidation of ownership equates to massive thought consolidation. Collin Powell’s little boy ran the FCC into the ground during his tenure. When the rest of the country could clearly see that consolidation of thought would be detrimental to the medium, Powell punted and allowed still greater concentration of television station ownership.
[snipped for length – see comment below]
http://www.peeniewallie.com
Instead of cutting and pasting everything from the peeniewallie blog and posting it in the guestbook, maybe it would be a bit more subtle just to post “see this link” or something.
I for one don’t open comments to read novels, I just skip over those posts.
Agreed, Jay.
This is funny, check out how CNN filed the Eason story (first article, “Where’s Eason?”)
http://www.michaeltotten.com/
On the other hand…
http://tinyurl.com/5lfg4
…At the outset of the invasion, journalists were warned by the U.S. military not to operate independently in Iraq, and one British TV reporter, with his crew, died attempting to do so. The Mirror newspaper in the U.K. reported that witnesses watched a U.S. military helicopter kill the journalists. Other journalists attempting to operate independently in Iraq were detained by U.S. troops, and, in the early days of the invasion, U.S. forces threatened � according to a senior British reporter � to launch missiles against media organizations transmitting pictures out of Baghdad. U.S. missiles had already killed dozens of reporters in Afghanistan (where Al-Jazeera, Radio Kabul, and the BBC were attacked in 2001) and Serbia (where Serbian TV, along with CNN facilities, were attacked in 1999).
Both the Arab television media and the international news agencies have borne the brunt of the violence. CPJ and the other journalists� organizations record a large number of lethal and non-lethal attacks by U.S. troops on Arab journalists. A senior Al-Jazeera correspondent was arrested, released, and re-arrested in Spain without clear charges, and an Al-Jazeera cameraman has been detained in Guantanamo Bay for four years. In Iraq, two Iranian journalists were detained for four months without charge. Two Al-Jazeera employees reported that they were tortured by U.S. troops last year, and the Associated Press reported that an Arab cameraman working for a European broadcaster said, after being attacked by U.S. troops, �They checked our identity badges and then let us go, saying they thought we were with Al-Jazeera. …� Several Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya journalists have been killed by U.S. forces in well-documented incidents. Robert Fisk wrote with alarm about an attack by U.S. troops which he witnessed on a clearly marked press vehicle, again, driven by Arab journalists…