As the blogosphere continues to hammer at MSM stonewalling over the the Eason Jordan – Davos story; Michelle Malkin has useful updates here and here. Most interesting tidbit – copy of an email to Mickey Kaus, from Howard Kurtz;
I have a story in tomorrow’s paper. Had you been kind enough to check earlier, I would have told you that I flagged it for The Post on the day that I was crashing on CBS naming Bob Schieffer as Rather’s temporary replacement and said we should pursue it. Two other Post reporters pursued it, spoke to Jordan and decided not to write anything based on the fact that what was actually said was in dispute. I had nothing to do with that decision. I’ve since picked it up, done additional reporting and filed my story.
That sort of calls out for a “harumph!” emoticon.
update – The “narrowly focused” Kurtz piece is now online. Captain Ed is profoundly unimpressed and wonders why Kurtz – who reads his blog – didn’t mention that Jordan’s words at Davos were part of a long-standing pattern of unsubstanciated accusations against the military.
It took Kurtz over a week to finally get around to publishing this article on Eason’s Fables. In that time, it appears that Kurtz did as little investigation as possible on Jordan. My readers and I found all of Jordan’s earlier commentary within 24 hours, and we only have very limited access to Nexis and full-time jobs doing other things than media analysis. Worse than that, all of this information has been repeatedly presented on my blog — in fact, it was all presented on my blog today, and we know Howard Kurtz read my blog sometime this afternoon. Why didn’t Kurtz ask about his remarks in Portugal from three months ago, or about his identical accusations against Israel two years ago? Why didn’t Kurtz press Jordan on the entire story? Only Kurtz can answer that, and I doubt he will have much more to say to anyone about Eason’s Fables from this point onward.
As Glenn Reynolds noted a few days ago,
A story in today’s Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are bloggers journalists?”
Perhaps we should start asking if journalists are journalists.
Indeed.
Howie’d gig at CNN makes him an unlikely persuer of the truth.He’s got his weasel word excuses down to a T.
What I don’t understand is why doesn’t someone in the U.S. military sue Eason Jordan in civil court for slander? There’s enough people on the record that heard, first hand, exactly what he said and understood what he meant. Can’t we get a lawsuit rolling somewhere and have a judge subpoena the tape? What am I missing here?
http://www.peeniewallie.com
Aside from the idea that the military has better things to do than go after goofballs like Eason, I’m not sure you can sue for silly slander. Like if I were to accuse Bush of being a communist martian, I can’t imagine a court being willing to hear that.
In this case, the goofball aspect is obvious. If the military wanted journalists dead, it would be a much higher number than 12.
If a slander charge was a practical option for the military then Kerry would have gone to jail a long time ago.