CNN Chief News Director

[Annie]

Just blathers away and helps the enemy:

http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2005/01/do_us_troops_ta.html

Do US Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?

Davos, Switzerland from the WEF 2005

This fiery topic became a real nightmare today for the Chief News Executive of CNN at what was an initially very mild discussion at the World Economic Forum titled "Will Democracy Survive the Media?".

At a discussion moderated by David R. Gergen, the Director for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the concept of truth, fairness, and balance in the news was weighed against corporate profit interest, the need for ratings, and how the media can affect democracy. The panel included Richard Sambrook, the worldwide director of BBC radio, U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, Abdullah Abdullah, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, and Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive of CNN. The audience was a mix of journalists, WEF attendees (many from Arab countries), and a US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd.

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.

Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real "sh--storm". What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd. The other looming shadow on what was going on was the presence of a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator in the middle of some very serious accusations about the U.S. military.

To be fair (and balanced), Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it. But when pressed by others, he seemed to waver back and forth between what might have been his beliefs and the realization that he had created a kind of public mess. His statements, his reaction, and the reaction of all in attendance left me perplexed and confused. Many in the crowd, especially those from Arab nations, applauded what he said and called him a "very brave man" for speaking up against the U.S. in a public way amongst a crowd ready to hear anti-US sentiments. I am quite sure that somewhere in the Middle East, right now, his remarks are being printed up in Arab language newspapers as proof that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt nation. That is a real nightmare, because the Arab world is taking something said by a credible leader of the media (CNN!) as the gospel, or koranic truth. What is worse is that I am not really sure what Eason really meant to communicate to us, but I do know that he was quite passionate about it. Members of the audience took away what they wanted to hear, and now they will use it in every vile and twisted way imaginable.

 

[dilloduck]

Just blathers away and helps the enemy:

http://www.forumblog.org/blog/2005/01/do_us_troops_ta.html

Asshole---think he needs to have a private one-on-one with a marine.

 

[CSM]

Asshole---think he needs to have a private one-on-one with a marine.

Naw, we just add him to the list of targets...we do have a list you know!

 

[NATO AIR]

Naw, we just add him to the list of targets...we do have a list you know!

Disgusting how good journalists are tortured and killed for doing their job in corrupt places like Burma and Ukraine, but a disgusting traitor like this lives in safety and comfort.

 

[onedomino]

Eason Jordan [Chief News Executive of CNN] asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted.

Very disturbing, to say the least. Though CNN Iraq reporting is about as objective and balanced as AL-Jazeera. Hey Jordon, A-J is for sale. Go for it. You'd fit right in.

Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it. But when pressed by others, he seemed to waver back and forth...

So why did he make the original accusation? This slanderer of the US military is “Chief News Executive” of CNN? Unbelievable! Is it any wonder that the number of CNN viewers has fallen so far? In my opinion, CNN is even less credible than CBS.

 

[onedomino]

Eason Jordon, CNN Chief News Executive, in context:

Eason Jordan: The Shame of the Mainstream Media

http://newsisyphus.blogspot.com/ (full text)

...it was an op-ed in the NY Times [04.11.03], by someone we had never heard of--a man identified as Eason Jordan, CNN's "Chief News Executive"--we expected to simply disagree, snort in derision and move on to LGF or The Corner for a little sanity.

Except about half-way into Jordan's piece, entitled "The News We Kept to Ourselves," we began to slowly realize that we were reading what was likely to become a huge news story. We read it, the re-read it, then read it some more. We parsed the sentences, took apart the paragraphs and ran it through our heads over and over. 7:30am came and went and we were still reading it. We simply could not believe it: unless we had lost the ability to comprehend simple written English, here was the man in charge of news operations for what was then the nation's most popular cable news network admitting that he and his journalist colleagues had colluded with the regime of Saddam Hussein in a conspiracy to hide the full truth of that horrific regime from the American people.

Jordan began the piece by explaining that he had made numerous visits to Baghdad to lobby the Ba'athist regime to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open. He described what he saw and learned on those visits:

Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.

Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

Having personally witnessed the fact that his own employees were, in the pursuit of his business, being ruthlessly tortured by a remorseless and pitiless regime, Jordan did what any good journalist would do: he spoke truth to power, comforted the inflicted, inflicted the comfortable, removed his bureau from Baghdad and ordered his reporters to report the truth about the Iraqi regime to Americans and the rest of the world.

Just kidding! If we were to believe the fairy-tales that float out the most prestigious journalism schools, that is what would have happened. But this was CNN, and telling the truth was not the highest priority. Instead, Jordan did what he had to do to maintain "access" to a murdering band of fascists so that he could be competitive and still deliver the "story," never mind that the resulting story was so much lies and tissue.

Don't believe us? Let Jordan tell you himself:

We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).

Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf (our old friend, and stellar comedian, Baghdad Bob!) that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would ''suffer the severest possible consequences.'' CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for ''crimes,'' one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
(Emphasis added).

At last? At last?!?

Of course, Jordan could have told these stories freely at any time. The only reason he did not was to keep CNN on the beat in Baghdad. Jordan says that he saved lives by not reporting what he knew to be the truth, but the fact is that CNN's continued presence continued to put Iraqis at risk, a risk CNN was self-evidently complicit in. CNN could have reported all these stories and refused to collaborate with a terrorist regime, but, instead, it chose to remain and to repeat, daily, the sordid lies so familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to live in a totalitarian regime.

"Nothing wrong here. Reports of terror are just so many American lies. The people here love Saddam. " During the entire run-up to the Iraq War, the nation's leading news network had evidence of the kind of cruelty and torture President Bush accused the Iraqi regime of ("Axis of Evil", what a moron!) and chose to do and say absolutely nothing. This from a network that would go on to hype the criminal activities of a few renegade soldiers at Abu Ghraib as the Worst War Crime of All Time.

Every time a person watched a CNN report on Iraq up til April 2003, that person was being lied to. Every time you watch a report on CNN about Syria, North Korea, Iran or Zimbabwe, you have to know that this is an organization that has proved itself ready "to do business" with murderous regimes in order to file those reports. And who do we have to thank for finding that out? Why, CNN's own "Chief News Executive." We were so stunned we called him in his Atlanta office to ask him what the hell he was thinking when he was covering up human rights abuses for access, and, more, what the hell he was thinking when he took to the pages of the NY Times to admit it. All we got was his voicemail, but we were pretty happy with the resulting message. We're not so sure he was.

This sad incident dropped like--like---well, dropped like the Afghan elections from the pages of the nation's MSM. We had thought the resulting story was so obvious that, even if only in self-interest, other media outlets would take it up. Only Fox News had the wisdom to see the story for what it was, but even they underplayed it. (Good Lord, imagine if Roger Ailes admitted in the Weekly Standard that Fox knew about Abu Ghraib but declined to report it because it was concerned about repercussions on the ground!)

It says a lot, an awful lot, about the state of our current media that Jordan and CNN weren't even remotely held accountable for what they had done in Iraq.

And, now, Jordan has done it again. Today, according to the World Economic Forum Weblog:

At a discussion moderated by David R. Gergen, the Director for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the concept of truth, fairness, and balance in the news was weighed against corporate profit interest, the need for ratings, and how the media can affect democracy. The panel included Richard Sambrook, the worldwide director of BBC radio, U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, Abdullah Abdullah, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, and Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive of CNN. The audience was a mix of journalists, WEF attendees (many from Arab countries), and a US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd.

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others. .

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.

Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real "sh--storm". What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd. The other looming shadow on what was going on was the presence of a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator in the middle of some very serious accusations about the U.S. military.

The author of this blog is certainly correct to stress that last point; at the very least--the very least--it is now incumbent on Frank and Dodd to uphold the honor of the United States and her military and rebut these outrageous and spurious charges. It's a shame that this duty falls to two MCs who are very likely not to understand, let alone support, even the concept of national honor, but that's how the chips fall sometimes. Let Congress investigate these charges in front of international cameras. Let the first witness be Jordan; let him produce what we in law schools call "evidence."

But know this: the media can laugh off conservative complaints of media bias and argue that Fox News is jingoistic trash for morons, but we now know for certain two things about CNN's "Chief News Executive": 1) he hid the truth about a despotic regime in a quest for access and ratings, by his own admission; and 2) he thinks that the US military has deliberately targeted journalists for killing, by his own words.

If that's what they're willing to admit, what are they not telling us? Until the MSM sweeps out rubbish like Jordan, they can continue their terminal slide into irrelevance.

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs is now reporting that Barney Frank stood up for America on this one. Good for you, Congressman! We have our differences, but we are all American, an we'll be damned if we ever see the day any MC (except for the far left fringe) fails to uphold our national honor. According to the Gay Patriot:

And then, this liberal Democrat [Frank] pressed Mr. Jordan to be more specific, putting the CNN Executive on the spot. The newsman rambled on a bit and mumbled some sort of response about how "'There are people who believe there are people in the military who have it out' for journalists." He could provide no evidence to buttress his claims, then "offered another anecdote: A reporter who'd been standing in a long line to get through a checkpoint at Baghdad's Green Zone had been turned back by the GI on duty. Apparently the soldier had been displeased with the reporter's dispatches, and sent him to the back of the line."

OH MY GOD!!! He had to go to the back of the line?!? Might as well have pumped a few bullets into his head, eh Eason?

-

 

[Annie]

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000726.html

February 02, 2005
The full picture?
Posted by Mary Madigan


In October 2002, CNN’s news chief Eason Jordan told Franklin Foer of The New Republic that his network gave "a full picture" of Saddam’s regime." He challenged Foer to find instances of CNN neglecting stories about Saddam's horrors.


In April 2003, Jordan admitted in a New York Times op-ed that CNN had learned some "awful things" about the Saddam’s regime that they were afraid to print for fear of losing access to live camera feeds.


Jordan, who downplayed the crimes of Saddam’s regime, is now speculating, without any proof, in a very public forum, that members of the American military targeted and murdered a dozen journalists.


According to Rony Abovitz


During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.


Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real "sh--storm". What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd.


Hugh Hewitt has more..

While Jordan’s statement may not cause as much damage as Noam Chomsky’s statement that the U.S. intended to ‘casually starve’ a million Afghans to death in a "silent genocide", it seems to come from the same impulse. Downplaying the crimes of dictators while exaggerating, or making up 'facts' about crimes committed by the United States is passive aggressive form of attack that some seem to find habit-forming.


UPDATE: According to Instapundit, foreign journalists aren't corroborating Jordan.


Of course, the Guardian has a history of repeating what Jordan says, verbatim, but they’ll believe anything.


As to the question of why established professionals like Eason feel that they have to make stuff up, commenter ZF says:


The common thread, it seems to me, is that these are all 60's liberal white males having some sort of mid-life crisis which has impelled them to invent a grandiose, exaggerated and heroic version of their past. Maybe we should look at this as a male version of cosmetic surgery?

Sounds about right.. Posted by Mary Madigan at February 2, 2005

 

[Annie]

http://instapundit.com/archives/020999.php

 

[Annie]

Still not reading the blogs? Why not?

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050205/COLUMNIST14/502050330/-1/NEWS17

Media are easy marks

HISTORY repeats itself, Karl Marx said, "first as tragedy, second as farce."
In the days immediately following Iraq's historic election, two videotapes from "insurgent" groups were distributed to the news media. One purported to show an American soldier being held hostage. The second purported to show that a British C-130 transport aircraft, which crashed on election day, had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

The "American soldier" was Cody, a G.I. Joe action figure. This is obvious from the picture, but the Associated Press and CNN bit hard.

The cause of the C-130 crash is still being investigated. But experts at Jane's Defence Weekly have doubts about the claim of "insurgents."

"The missile footage has just been grafted onto the front," said editor Peter Felstead. "And it looks like a surface to surface missile to me."

Other experts note the wreckage footage was shot in daylight, while the C-130 crashed just before nightfall. It is highly improbable "insurgents" could have been on the scene before the sun set, and there were British soldiers all around the next morning.

Media outlets that were quick to report the insurgents' claims had little to say about the hoaxes. Nor did they speculate on what the hoaxes might mean.

Last Sunday's election demonstrated the massive support of the Iraqi people for democracy, and the relative impotence of the "insurgents." The "river of blood" they promised was barely a trickle.

Eight suicide bombers killed 36 Iraqis besides themselves. Of these, seven were foreigners (six Saudis and a Sudanese). The only Iraqi suicide bomber was a child suffering from Down syndrome. That is, as the Iraqi writer Nibras Kazimi put it, "eight against 8 million." And on what basis, one might ask, do the media call seven foreign terrorists "insurgents"?

The terrorists had to do something to revive their plummeting prestige. That they resorted to clumsy frauds is not a sign of strength.

"The captured toy story could be pretty significant," said the Web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line). "The terrorists need, more than anything else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear, they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule. Their pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will [make] them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world."

It's also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by-product of embarrassment. But more to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.

The major media have from the beginning exaggerated the strength and popularity of those they mislabel "insurgents," to the disgust of American soldiers.

"I'm tired of hearing the crap, the whole, well 'We are barely hanging on, we're losing, the insurgency is growing,'●" Marine Sgt. Kevin Lewis told Dan Rather, in Iraq for the election. "It's just a small amount of people out there causing the problems. It's a small number, and we're killing them."

The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.

Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists.

Mr. Jordan's slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the "mainstream" media.

Gee, I wonder why not.

 

[Annie]

More, submit your questions, link at site:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2112917/

Friday, February 4, 2005

Kurtz Stays Silent in Eason Jordan Controversy! Day 7. ...Seriously, isn't this something you'd expect WaPo's media reporter to cover, one way or another? ... Update: Apparently the videotape of Jordan's remarks is available. No doubt Kurtz will vigorously pursue the tape, which doesn't look very hard to get. (Who would want to suppress the truth?) Then he can "cablecast" the video on his show, "Reliable Sources," on CNN! Piece of cake. ... An easy week for Kurtz!. ... P.S.: You, the reader, can ask Kurtz about all this on Monday's WaPo "Media BackScratch"--I think I've got that name right. ... Questions can be submitted now. ... Servers are standing by! ...12:29 P.M.

 

[onedomino]

Pretty funny. Of course the name of the show should be "Unreliable Sources." Or maybe it should be called "MSM Makeover."

 

[Annie]

Many a link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6901445/#050204

There goes Mr. Jordan• February 4, 2005 | 3:50 PM ET

Earlier I mentioned CNN news executive Eason Jordan's comments at Davos. Jordan accused U.S. soldiers of targeting journalists, though he reportedly backed down when challenged by Congressman Barney Frank. Here's a good summary:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during a discussion on media and democracy, Mr. Jordan apparently told the audience that "he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted," according to a report on the forum's Web site (www.Forumblog.org). The account was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, although no transcript of the discussion has surfaced. Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd were also present, but calls to their offices were not returned in time for publication.

In any event, it's an assertion Mr. Jordan has made before. In November, as reported in the London Guardian, Mr. Jordan said, "The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the U.S. military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by U.S. forces." This is very serious stuff, if true. Yet aside from Mr. Jordan's occasional comments, there's no evidence to support it. Mr. Jordan's almost immediate backpedaling seems to confirm this. In a statement to blogger Carol Platt Liebau, Mr. Jordan said, "To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq. I said so during the forum panel discussion. But, nonetheless, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity." He added, "three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq." He didn't elaborate by whom.

According to information on CPJ's Web site (www.CPJ.org), between 2003 and 2004, 12 journalists were killed as a result of U.S. fire. None was from CNN. At least a few of those were instances of mistaken identity. In one case, Terry Lloyd of ITV News was in an SUV at the start of the war in March 2003. As CPJ notes, an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal cited accounts of U.S. troops who recalled firing upon cars marked "TV" since it was believed suicide bombers were using them to attack U.S. troops. It appears, however, that Mr. Lloyd's vehicle was caught in a crossfire. Aside from this one dubious case, none of the other reported deaths even remotely resembles intentional targeting by U.S. troops.

That's from the Washington Times, which is the only major-media outlet to give this story attention. (I kind of expected Howard Kurtz to mention it, but I suppose his relationship with CNN makes that sticky). As blogger Ed Morrissey notes, the story has been widely ignored by outlets that ought to be covering it.

After all, either Jordan's telling the truth -- in which case it's an explosive story of U.S. troop misconduct of the sort U.S. media usually pounce on -- or, alternatively, Jordan's lying -- in which case it's an explosive story of misconduct at a major news organization. I guess they're not as quick to pounce on those stories, which makes me think that Jordan's story isn't true.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed a blogger who was there, and apparently there is a videotape of the event. So where is it? It will either prove that Jordan is being misquoted, or that he's not. (CNN initially claimed that his remarks were taken "out of context," though it has since shifted its position and now says that Jordan expressed himself badly).

Was this an innocent misunderstanding based on clumsy phraseology? Or did a top executive at a major news operation tell a lie to foreign representatives in order to ingratiate himself to anti-Americans at the price of slandering American troops? The longer CNN and Jordan stonewall, the more people will believe the worst.