Burying the Lede

One newspaper’s lede editorial says Eason Jordan resigned for no good reason:

As for Mr. Jordan, he initially claimed that U.S. forces in Iraq had targeted and killed 12 journalists. Perhaps he intended to offer no further specifics in order to leave an impression of American malfeasance in the minds of his audience, but there is no way of knowing for sure. What we do know is that when fellow panelist Representative Barney Frank pressed Mr. Jordan to be specific, the CNN executive said he did not believe it was deliberate U.S. government policy to target journalists. Pressed further, Mr. Jordan could only offer that “there are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out” for journalists, and cite two examples of non-lethal abuse of journalists by ordinary GIs.

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.

Earlier tonight, I wrote that

I wasn’t so interested in the Jordan Affair. “Silly man says silly things to silly people at a silly conference? And he works for CNN?” I was so shocked, you could have knocked me over with a wrecking ball.

So I find myself agreeing with the editors who wrote the piece I quoted above. Editors, I might add, who work for that left-wing rag, The Wall Street Journal.

CLARIFICATION: Before the angry emails come in, I don’t. . .

. . .mean to defend Eason Jordan’s idiot comments.

. . .think the Jordan shouldn’t have been publically humiliated for what he said.

. . .agree that the Davos people were right for denying us the videotape.

. . .think that bloggers have acted as a “drooling” “lynch mob.”

What disappoints me is the way the MSM seemed to collude to defend one of their own. Had Jordan been a politician or political appointee, he would have been hounded from office. Even Howard Kurtz, who is reliable at least half the time (or ten times more often than most MSM in-house “media critics”) gave us nothing but a day-late-dollar-short-excuse-ridden whitewash.

Idiocy, however, almost never disappoints me; I’ve been a news junky for too long to expect much more than that.