Welcome to the machine. OK, I lied yesterday: this Eason Jordan thing has really gotten on my wick, and though I'm pretty sure it's getting tired, I find I have a few more thoughts to develop on it. Blame it on the conversational character of the blogspace.

Missing in all the virtual ink spilled so far—startlingly missing, in the case of a ruminative blog like PressThink—is any consideration of the question of responsiblity, of news judgement. By which I mean, not the judgement of the institutional media as evidenced in their willingness or unwillingness to pursue the Jordan story; I mean the judgement of the bloggers who have pushed it, with whatever agenda.

The nearest approach to the question I can find among Easonbloggers appears in Jay Rosen's (optimistically titled) "Closing Thoughts on the Resignation of Eason Jordan" yesterday:

To me, a resignation or firing is totally out of proportion to any offense given in Davos (that I know of.) ... I agree with the Wall Street Journal in an editorial today: "The worst that can reasonably be said about his performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may have been dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony."

Not a felony. I say not a crime. But here is what it was: An occasion when a news executive, a senior statesman at the network, miscommunicated about a matter of life and death, not to say a "story" of considerable (to the point of shocking) news value. And not in front of just anyone, but "representatives of the world," an international elite, which is part of the ruling fiction at Davos.

Taken at face value, this suggests an extraordinary, even opportunistic abrogation of news judgement. Past the "matter of life and death" blather, which seems like so much special pleading given the paragraph immediately above it, Rosen is essentially telling us that the story is self-justifying: that the mere importance of Jordan as a CNN executive, combined with the "elite" setting in which his remarks were made, add up (in shocking degree, no less) to "news value."

Eason Jordan lost his job for expressing an opinion—more exactly, for alleging as fact (or appearing to) what can really only have been an opinion, about military targeting of journalists in Iraq. Let's stipulate to Jordan's having expressed this opinion in its most provocative form, though he has explicitly and repeatedly disavowed it: American troops in Iraq have deliberately murdered journalists. Let's stipulate further (though it can't remotely be true, as a look at some genuine, careful blog journalism will indicate) that Jordan possessed no facts at all on which to base that opinion. Is this news? Is it news deserving of a blogstorm? With nothing more than this in the hopper, it's very difficult to see why anybody honest (i.e., who wasn't looking for an opportunity to crank up the right-wing smear machine) would have given what Eason Jordan said a second thought.

People express opinions all the time. In informal settings, even when speaking within their professional sphere of competence, they express opinions that are slapdash, ill-considered, capable of misconstrual. They may think they know things that they really don't. They may repeat the opinions or observations of others as their own, without having first skeptically examined them. None of this, even in the case of a CNN news executive, is a revelation to anybody with any sense. As Jordan was not a reporter on the ground in Iraq, whose coverage might plausibly be imagined to be tainted by his opinion; and as he was speaking unpremeditatedly in a panel discussion, rather than delivering a statement of his or his network's position on military-journalist relations; there seems, as there always did, very little real meat on these bones.

The uncritical acceptance of the Jordan story as Important seems to be structured by an unexamined, and badly outdated, narrative. This is a narrative in which bloggers are the Little Guys, and CNN and its like are the Power from which the little guys are to "seek truth," as Jeff Jarvis has it today. The narrative gains wattage from plugging in a set of loosely conspiratorial tropes that Rosen's writing has had access to: CNN, with its global tentacles, "works like a private network among the powerful"; Davos is an intellectual playground of the "international elite." Notice that I don't say that Rosen indulges conspiracy theory: this is a rhetoric, a tropology, and exists well below the level of theory. And it affords us access to the mythos of Easongate, the story that I think really does animate the right-wing wolfpack here: Jordan is saying things to the elite that he's not saying to us! (The refusal of the WEF to release the tape of his remarks, based on a longstanding off-the-record policy, dramatically boosts the narrative energy here.) He is forming elite opinion out of our view! Somehow (but we have no responsiblity to document how), with CNN and Davos as its instruments, that opinion will have an effect in the world, and we'll be unable to resist it!

And the reality? Jeff Jarvis congratulates the Eason bloggers for having committed real journalism; Jay Rosen congratulates blogs for being "little First Amendment machines." Speaking practically, though, the Easongate blogstorm boils down to a demand that anyone in a position of influence in Big Media be on the record, always, their remarks immediately vettable, whenever they make any even semi-public appearance. ("There is no such thing any more as off the record," as several triumphalist Eason bloggers have proclaimed.) It should be apparent that this is not a demand for legitimate transparency in the gathering and dissemination of news product. Nor is it a demand that seeks to promote the practice of citizen journalism (to which, pace Jarvis, the hue and cry about the withheld Davos tape bears only the most superficial relation). It is a demand, instead, that bloggers should be recognized as a kind of commissariate of the mass media: that blogs should patrol the borders of acceptable opinion, not merely as it appears in print or on the air but in any possible expression of any mainstream journalist's thinking. And that, given the prevailing asymmetries of political power and media access, is a demand for a Gresham's Law effect to take hold in institutional journalism, a demand that only those opinions acceptable to the most avid of the blogstorm troopers be allowed any room to circulate.

Flattering yourself that you're speaking truth to power, when you yourself occupy a position of newly minted power, might feel good but it's retrograde. Bloggers, particularly when coordinated as those on the right are, have shown that they can smash things. Honest bloggers, left and right, are going to have to come to terms with that capacity, and with the responsiblity that having it imposes. It's just not good enough any more to play the game of Little Guy vs. the Machine. The Machine is you now; start dealing with it, or let the worst elements take it over.

posted by michael  1:38:46 PM  
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