The Eason Jordan Story: It's Deja Vu All Over Again
As I commented over at Captain Ed's, it now looks like the Eason Jordan story is going to play out like a couple other stories that I have followed closely, and which percolated only slowly into the mainstream media.
Anybody remember the
VVAW assassination plot story? Back in 1971, John Kerry attended a meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, where it was proposed that the group target US Senators in favor of the war, for assassination. Tom Lipscomb
broke the story in the tiny
New York Sun and for a good week or two the MSM tried to ignore it while the rumblings from the blogosphere over the story continued to rise.
Or how about Christmas in Cambodia? I know, I talk about it way too much. But let's just focus on how the media covered it. The news first
hit the blogs (ignoring our original posts in May) about August 5th, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released Chapter 3 of Unfit for Command. The story got incredible coverage on the blogs and on the radio, with Hugh Hewitt devoting almost three weeks of shows to it. And yet the legacy media tried their darnedest to ignore it. Fox News led with it on August 9th, and on the 10th a few newspapers (NY Post, Chicago Tribune and Washington Times) covered the story. It was almost a week later that the story started to hit the liberal papers with the LA Times (17th), the Boston Globe (17th) and finally the New York Times (19th).
As John Leo noted
at the time:
Some people wondered how long the major media would be willing to ignore the Christmas-in-Cambodia story. Well, the answer is in: at least 10 or 11 days. I first noticed the story August 6 on Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit blog. Soon it was all over the Internet, the conservative press, talk radio, and some cable shows. But the networks, the New York Time s , the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other major media didn't run the story. Some papers, like the Kansas City Star, got protests from readers on what appeared to be a news blackout. Finally, after an agonizingly slow response from the Kerry campaign, big media took account of the issue, muffling and burying the story they didn't want to carry in the first place.
Okay, so we can expect the stonewall to continue for another week or so. Fox News did cover it
briefly in passing:
U.S. Troops Targeting Journalists?
And CNN’s top news executive Ethan Jordan (search) has found himself called to account by none other than Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank (search). This after Jordan seemed to suggest that the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, that American troops were deliberating targeting and killing foreign journalists in Iraq, including Western journalists.
The transcriber obviously misspelled Eason Jordan's first name, but so far that is it for MSM coverage of this affair. Stay tuned!
