Regarding Eason Jordan

There’s been a lot of chest-thumping in the blogosphere — and a lot of hand-wringing in the mediasphere — about Eason Jordan’s resignation from CNN. Most of this debate is on whether Jordan’s blog-fueled exit is good or bad. For me, there’s another question — did the blogosphere really force him out? I ask this after reading Ed Morrissey’s timeline of Jordangate in the Weekly Standard. Assuming that Morrissey’s account is accurate, then the media heat on Jordan was never particularly strong — and it was dying down the day before he left CNN. Consider this section of Morrissey’s article:

On Thursday, February 10, two national news organizations finally covered the story, but only to declare it overblown. The New York Times posted a wire-service story late in the evening to its Thursday edition, while the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Bret Stephens. While he acknowledged that Jordan had used “defamatory innuendo,” Stephens wound up decrying the bloggers:

There is an Easongate.com Web site, on which more than 1,000 petitioners demand that Mr. Jordan release a transcript of his remarks–made recently in Davos–by Feb. 15 or, in the manner of Saddam Hussein, face serious consequences. Sean Hannity and the usual Internet suspects have all weighed in. So has Michelle Malkin, who sits suspended somewhere between meltdown and release. There’s a reason the hounds are baying. Already they have feasted on the juicy entrails of Dan Rather. Mr. Jordan, whose previous offenses (other than the general tenor of CNN coverage) include a New York Times op-ed explaining why access is a more important news value than truth, was bound to be their next target. And if Mr. Jordan has now made a defamatory and unsubstantiated allegation against U.S. forces, well then . . . open the gates.

The strange and unexpected turn from the Journal signaled what should have been the end of the story, at least as far as the national media were concerned. The controversy seemed about to fade off the media’s radar screens altogether–until Jordan suddenly resigned his position at CNN around 6:00 p.m. on Friday, February 11. (emphasis added)

In a blog post on the same topic, Morrissey again complains about the lack of media attention to this story:

Not only did the blogswarm find damning information which the national media could have used all along, but we repeatedly sent the information in e-mails to key people in the media. Instead of acknowledging that function and assimilating the information, the media has circled the wagons around the myth that Eason Jordan simply committed a slip of the tongue at Davos, rather than the documented string of slanders and ethical lapses stretching over more than a decade.

So Morrissey acknowledges that the story was starting to lose steam the day before Jordan left, and that the mainstream media seemed disinclined to pursue the story any further. If the MSM was either not paying much attention or playing down the scandal, why did Jordan choose to resign when he did? There are three possibilities:

1) The mobilized blogosphere is now so powerful that it no longer needs media attention to affect real change; 2) Jordan knew he would be toast if the videotaped version of his Davos remarks went public, knew the tape would eventually get out, and so chose to leave before things got really ugly; 3) Jordan resigned for reasons mostly unrelated to his Davos comments, but the blog stuff provided good cover for CNN to push him out.

I just don’t think (1) is true — if it is, it certainly violates the argument that Henry Farrell and I have made about when blogs are influential. (2) might be correct — see Rebecca MacKinnon on this point — but based on what both Stephens and David Gergen have said, I’m dubious about the tape being that damaging. [But Morrissey points out that what he said at Davos fits a larger pattern–ed. Yes, but Morrissey also laments the fact that this was not reported in the MSM beyond the original Guardian story from last November.] Which leads me to (3). It’s telling that Katherine Q. Seelye’s New York Times account observes, “Some of those most familiar with Mr. Jordan’s situation emphasized, in interviews over the weekend, that his resignation should not be read solely as a function of the heat that CNN had been receiving on the Internet, where thousands of messages, many of them from conservatives, had been posted.” And, as Mickey Kaus points out, Howard Kurtz’s first-draft version of what happened provided an alternative explanation. Check out this Keith Olbermann post as well. Unlike Michelle Malkin, I haven’t called anyone to check out this hypothesis — this is only me spitballing. But something ain’t right here. I’m curious what others think — and I’m particularly curious what the higher-ups at CNN think.