WASHINGTON – Eason Jordan resigned Friday night as CNN’s chief news executive in an effort to quell a bubbling controversy over his remarks about U.S. soldiers killing journalists in Iraq.
Even as he said he had misspoken at an international conference in suggesting that coalition troops had “targeted” a dozen journalists, and insisted he never believed that, Jordan was being pounded hourly by Web site bloggers – liberals as well as conservatives – who provided the rocket fuel for a story that otherwise might have fizzled.
Jordan, 44, said Friday he was quitting after 23 years at the network “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 never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise.”
No definitive account of what Jordan said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 27 has been made public. Two congressional Democrats who were there, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, criticized Jordan’s remarks.
Frank said that it sounded as if Jordan “was saying it was military policy to take out journalists.”
Jordan later “modified” his remarks to say some U.S. soldiers did this “maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger,” Frank said.
Jay Rosen, chairman of New York University’s journalism department, said he didn’t think Jordan “had engaged in a firing offense.”
Bloggers “made a lot of noise” about the Jordan flap, Rosen said. “But there was basic reporting going on – finding the people who were there, getting them to make statements, comparing one account to another – along with accusations and conspiracy thinking and the politics of paranoia and attacks on the … mainstream media.”
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