Eason Down The Road

We haven't had a whole lot to say about Easongate thus far, because at face value, something seemed a bit hinky. It was rather difficult to believe that the Chief News Executive of CNN would so careless and radioactively stupid as to assert that US troops were deliberately targeting journalists; even more so that he would choose to make the great unveiling of said assertion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Still more stupid is that when confronted with protest to his assertion, Jordan immediately began backtracking, apparently unable to provide solid evidence for his claims. Too little, too late -- the righty bloggers were all over this like stink on shit, and Jordan was summarily told not to let the door hit his ass on the way out.

At first blush (and maybe even second), you might figure "fair enough". After all, while we have all heard of this or that journalist being accidentally killed in the crossfire, to brazenly assert that this could be a policy seems unlikely. Still, just to say we made double-sure, we should hope that someone in the MSM would take a break from weather wildness and Michael Jackson sightings to investigate the actual safekeeping of their embedded brethren. We have all also heard about the myriad death threats one journalist got when his videotape of a US soldier killing a prostrate, unarmed Iraqi combatant went public. So maybe someone oughta check into it, just so we can call it good.

Well, someone actually checked into it. And while this doesn't prove Eason Jordan's assertion -- particularly given his subsequent waffling and backpedaling -- there is at least enough here to safely say that more care should be taken. Where Jordan leapt far too quickly to the imputation of outright malice, we see more of the usual military stance of indifference to the problem. This is understandable; they're in the middle of an ongoing conflict, and they're going to look out for their platoon first, Geraldo Rivera second. (Indeed, maybe not at all for Geraldo. Who could blame them for that?)

It's difficult to feel any sympathy for Jordan -- he made a remarkably irresponsible claim at a worldwide event, with not a shred of evidence to back it up. But in cursorily glancing at the various bloggers who managed to claim Jordan's scalp, they seemed more interested in resurrecting the Alien and Sedition Act than trying to find facts to refute Jordan's claim. Merely insisting "we would never do something like that" is not a refutation. We never thought we'd be torturing anonymous unpersons at the Gitmo gulag, or sexually humiliating them at Abu Ghraib. But we did, and we are, and we even knowingly promoted the people responsible for such policies.

So after knowing what we know, we all need to be responsible, and perform due diligence, and get to the bottom of these things in a fact-based fashion, rather than jumping to our assumptions. This is a contrast with how the "Jeff Gannon" scandal has unfolded, with many bloggers compiling actual facts, statements, and timelines with which to build a foundation for their conclusions.


[via Altercation.]