The blog squad can add another notch to its belt

I’m all for the defenestration -- and perhaps even the decapitation -- of journalistic felons. Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, Stephen Glass and their ilk are serial fabricators who betrayed their profession, their colleagues and our democratic society.

But I feel very differently about Eason Jordan, the chief CNN news executive who resigned this month amid a firestorm of criticism over remarks he made during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Much of the criticism of Jordan came from angry bloggers, and Jordan and his bosses at CNN caved in faster than you can say “Chicken Little.”

No one seems to know exactly what Jordan said because the discussion was off the record and closed to the public and the sponsors of the conference, in keeping with past practice, have not released either a transcript or videotape of the discussion.

But immediately after the Jan. 27 event, the blogosphere was filled with reports that Jordan had said that U.S. troops had targeted and deliberately killed some American journalists in Iraq.

Did he really say that?

Except for one brief interview with the Washington Post 12 days after the panel discussion, Jordan has declined comment -- in part, I’d bet, because his severance agreement with CNN severely limits what he can say. (When I reached him, he said he couldn’t speak on the record about anything related to his remarks in Davos.)

In his Post interview, Jordan said, “I was trying to make a distinction between ‘collateral damage’ and people who got killed in other ways.... I have never once in my life thought anyone from the U.S. military tried to kill a journalist. Never meant to suggest that. Obviously I wasn’t as clear as I should have been on that panel.”

No, he sure wasn’t.

David Gergen, the moderator of the Davos panel, says Jordan made his comments in response to suggestions by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) that most of the 54 journalists and media support workers who’d been killed in Iraq had been victims of “collateral damage.”

Since three CNN journalists have been among those 54, that comment “hit a button” with Jordan, Gergen said during a discussion of the issue on PBS’ “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” “Collateral damage” seems like such a bloodless way to describe the deaths of one’s friends and colleagues -- and it suggests a purely accidental death.

Caught in the middle

Jordan had just returned from Baghdad and was “very deeply concerned about the safety of journalists on all sides,” Gergen said. “And he left a very clear impression that journalists on both sides were being targeted, that Iraqi insurgents were targeting American journalists and in a limited number of cases ... he left the impression there had been targeting by American troops of journalists....”

Gergen, former advisor to four presidents and now a professor of public service at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said Jordan realized immediately that he had “gone way too far. And he immediately began to walk his conversation back,” to make it clear that he was not saying there was an official U.S. policy to “allow the killing of journalists and that his concern was whether there had been some carelessness and whether, in fact, the Pentagon and others ought to push harder for more care so that other journalists will be protected.”

Others have raised similar concerns. “The second-leading cause of death of journalists in Iraq has been U.S. military fire,” Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, told me last week.

Cooper said she wasn’t suggesting that journalists had been “deliberately targeted,” only that “we believe negligence or indifference by the U.S. military has led to ... journalists being killed.”

But conservative bloggers attacked Jordan -- motivated in part by the long-standing right-wing argument that CNN is a liberal network. Although Rep. Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who was also present for the Davos discussion -- and who, like Frank, is a Democrat -- also criticized Jordan, it was the bloggers who did the damage.

Blogged down

Last year, conservative bloggers first tipped the world to the bogus documents that another allegedly liberal journalist, Dan Rather, relied on for a story questioning President Bush’s National Guard service, and those attacks led to Rather’s stepping down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and to the ouster of four CBS producers and executives. Now the conservative bloggers had Jordan in their sights. And rather than fight back, he quit.

“After 23 years at CNN,” he said Feb. 11, “I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq. I have devoted my professional life to helping make CNN the most trusted and respected news outlet in the world, and I would never do anything to compromise my work or that of the thousands of talented people it is my honor to work alongside.”

Jordan repeated that he had “never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent” when they “accidentally killed journalists,” and he apologized to “anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise. I have great admiration and respect for the men and women of the U.S. armed forces....”

Although the official word is that Jordan’s resignation was voluntary, I have to believe that the top brass at CNN, instead of rejecting his resignation, as they should have done, gave him a not-so-gentle push toward the door to defuse the increasingly nasty controversy.

What I don’t understand is why they -- and he -- caved in so quickly. I wish he’d asked -- begged, demanded -- that the organizers of the Davos forum release the videotape of his panel. I can only assume that he said what he’s accused of saying and that he doesn’t want those remarks in the public domain, even if they were followed by his quick backtracking.

If Jordan did say American troops target American journalists, he should be ashamed of himself. But he shouldn’t have lost his job.

Unlike Blair, Kelley, Glass and Rather, he didn’t publish or broadcast a dishonest story. He made -- appears to have unintentionally made -- a stupid, inflammatory statement that unfairly besmirched the honor of the U.S. armed forces. In the process, he also gave live ammunition to those who argue that the media are not only liberal but unpatriotic. He apologized and tried to explain what he’d meant, though, and that should have been the end of the story.

But bloggers appear to have achieved almost mythical power these days.

Bloggers can be useful. They did a good job, for example, in bringing the Rather/CBS screw-up to public attention. But some bloggers are just self-important ranters who seem to wake up every morning convinced that the entire Free World awaits their opinions on any subject that’s popped into their heads since their last fevered post.

Unfortunately, when these bloggers rise up in arms, grown men weep -- and news executives cave in. That’s much more alarming than anything Jordan said.

The men and women of the Wall Street Journal editorial page are surely no apologists for liberal journalists, but even they wrote last week, “The worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tied to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn’t a journalistic felony.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.