Would I buy a used car from this man?

That's Eason Jordan, the guy whose World Economic Forum remarks (that U.S. troops targeted journalists in Iraq) have generated a feeding frenzy in the blogosphere. Not only were his remarks unsubstantiated, but as of today, CNN is stonewalling the blogosphere by refusing to release them. Eventually, they'll have no choice, as stonewalling only heightens the sense of guilt.

After all these years, you'd think they'd have learned the most important political maxim to come along in the last four decades: the coverup is worse than the crime!

But then, perhaps it should be remembered that coverup is a trademark of Eason. From Austin Bay:

CNN has a corporate skeleton rattling in its closet, and the skeleton involves Jordan. It also involves a deal with a local ruling class—in this case, Saddam Hussein and his pals.

This is no allegation. Jordan wrote an essay for the NY Times admitting his network regularly withheld information about Saddam’s evil regime– because that’s what it took to keep the bureau open. (Here’s a link to the abstract of Jordans’ The News We Kept to Ourselves which ran in the NY Times on April 11, 2003. The abstract doesn’t do justice to the depravity of Jordan’s op-ed.)

I suspect we do not have all the facts on the CNN-Saddam deal, and in my view another major news organization should have investigated CNN’s admission. (If one did and I missed it, email me with a link.) Perhaps one of Baghdad’s new newspapers will take on that challenge, which would be deliciously ironic.

(Link via La Shawn Barber, who has plenty more.)

Not only I am not surprised that Jordan would do it again, I'd have been surprised if he hadn't. But that's why the blogosphere is such a dire threat. For decades, the media has been immune to the coverup rule --and bad reporting, false reporting, and non-reporting have all been allowed to go unchallenged.

They forget that bloggers don't forget. Bloggers are doing to the old media what the old media once thought it had the exclusive right to do: checking the facts and (as the expression goes) "speaking truth to power."

CNN must hate the fact that thanks to the Internet, its reporting offenses can be Googled, listed and enumerated -- long after the general public (with its short political memory) can be assumed to have forgotten.

Or long after a disgraced reporter has moved up to another position at another network!

Here's a typical example, culled at random. (I don't have to do this, and there are many more, but this will do.)

Former CNN President Richard Kaplan has been named president of MSNBC, NBC News' 24-hour cable channel. Kaplan replaces Erik Sorenson, who has been general manager of MSNBC since August 1998. ... Kaplan was most recently a senior vice president at ABC News. But from 1997 to 2000, Kaplan served as president of Atlanta-based CNN-US and was responsible for all news and programming at the flagship network of the CNN News Group. He was fired in 2000 after the network's reporting on "Operation Tailwind," a 1998 program charging that U.S. troops gassed dissidents and children in Laos during the Vietnam War, was discredited. He has also been criticized for his relationship with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Prior to his most recent tenure at ABC News, Kaplan was a teaching fellow at the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He currently serves as an adjunct Fellow and continues to consult and lecture at the Shorenstein Center and is a professor at the University of Illinois. Kaplan has received numerous awards for his work, including 34 Emmy Awards, four Oversees Press Club Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, four Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards and 12 Headliner Awards.

(Via Sandhill Trek.)

Can we expect any less for Mr. Jordan?

AFTERTHOUGHT: It's probably worth pointing out that Richard Kaplan was Eason Jordan's predecessor. Coincidence, of course. (Unless one imputes order to such games of musical chairs....)

UPDATE (02/11/05): The Eason Jordan story can no longer be ignored, and here's a good account of why. (In the old days, CNN's stonewalling might have worked.)

As I've said many times, Watergate would have been very different had the blogosphere existed.