When two high-profile stories surface nearly simultaneously and share some superficial traits, the news media will lump them together. The blogosphere, it seems, shares this understandable reflex. And so we have the parallel buzzes over the resignation of CNN exec Eason Jordan and the exposure of a dubious character in the White House press room sharing mind-space as examples of the ascendant power of blogs to make and break careers, expose error and deception and generally cause a ruckus. I Am Blogger, Hear Me Roar!
But these two stories are fundamentally different, and, I’d argue, of radically different import.
Jordan, the CNN exec who quit on Friday, apparently shot his mouth off at the Davos conference, making an overly broad statement of some kind (the Davos management won’t release a video or transcript of the event so there’s no record to refer to, only hearsay) suggesting that U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq. He backed off almost immediately, it seems, but his mea culpas weren’t sufficiently earnest.
Over the years at Salon I’ve been on the inside of stories like this enough times to know that, when you’re on the outside, you never have the full story, and the idea that angry bloggers alone laid Jordan low seems extraordinary unlikely to me. If you have your organization’s confidence, this sort of thing rolls off easily; if you don’t, then you’re vulnerable to the first controversy to come along.
I’m not shedding tears for the CNN executive. I’m always amazed at the stupid things CEOs, politicians, news honchos and other people who hold public responsibility will say in public (and do in private), thinking that the inherent power of their position grants them carte blanche and wraps them in Teflon. If they need to be beaten up over and over again until they really, really understand that — as the saying goes in blog-land — “off the record is dead,” fine.
Jordan joins Dan Rather and Jayson Blair and many, many other journalists now off-duty or just waiting to be disgraced someday. His story is now a routine one — that of the media pro who does not realize that the world has changed around him, that there is a new activist sphere of journalistic review and criticism happening collectively in real time, and that no gaffe, error or deception is likely to remain hidden. Until media people fully and deeply learn that they are responsible for their words and their work, and that this scrutiny is a good thing for their profession, careers will continue to fall casualty.
But this weeding-out process doesn’t take place in some sort of scientific vacuum, wherein the flaws of the profession can be precipitated out, leaving behind the pure essence of journalism. It is happening in the heart of a political storm. Jordan was a target for the right because conservatives think CNN is a liberal network. (That’s a joke, but let’s leave that partisan controversy alone for now.) And the conservative blogosphere is now claiming his scalp with a whoop.
It seems simple to equate that whoop with the glee on the left that preceded it, as bloggers unraveled the strange tale of “Jeff Gannon” — a fellow who mysteriously leaped from the obscurity of a right-wing Web site into the heart of the White House press corps, where he became a ringer for the Bush administration’s press secretary, who regularly turned to him for “questions” that hilariously echoed the Bush party line. It turned out Gannon was using a fake name, had only the most dubious claim to press credentials, and was plainly more of a shill than a reporter; when the collective investigations of the blogosphere began to turn up personal details that were embarrassing for an avowed conservative, “Gannon” publicly quit his job at “Talon News.”
So the score is tied, right? But this isn’t a game, or a battle with a body count; if the only significance here is — to borrow and twist a phrase from last decade’s partisan trench warfare — the Journalism of Personal Destruction, then it’s all pretty trivial.
Eason Jordan’s trial-by-blog is simply the latest example of the convulsive and painful but inevitable and long-brewing transformation of professional journalism from a protected sphere into a more open environment. That’s important, but it’s hadly news any more. The Gannon story, on the other hand, offers us a peek into the next chapter of the story — the one in which an opportunistic political establishment, sensing the vulnerability of the media, grabs the moment to reshape the public’s very grasp of reality.
Let’s remember that, while its press secretary is calling on the Jeff Gannons of the world for cover, the Bush administration is also offering under-the-counter payoffs to columnists and sending out video press releases in which PR people masquerade as reporters. This isn’t a simple matter of a gaffe here and there; it’s a systematic campaign to discredit the media, launched by an administration that desperately needs to keep propping up its Potemkin Village versions of reality (We’ll find weapons of mass destruction! We’ll cut the deficit! We’ll save Social Security by phasing it out! Really!). When you’re pursuing an Orwellian agenda, your first target must be anyone who has the standing to point it out. Messengers are a pain — but if you shoot enough of them (figuratively speaking!), and send out enough impostors, you can have any message you want.
Journalism, of course, has done so much on its own to discredit itself that the administration’s assault has an easy path; the timbers it’s battering are often rotten already. But while those of us who cherish the freedom, the liveliness and the free-for-all energy of the blogosphere — and I happily include myself — sit in our conferences and muse in our postings about the finer points of the transformations around us, the machinery of realpolitik is grinding away. It doesn’t care about the ethics of transparency or the abstract debate over “who is a journalist?” It simply seizes an opportunity to reduce the supply of what Ron Suskind calls “honest brokers.”
While we discuss how the “end of objectivity” means we have to find new ways to earn the public’s trust and pursue the goals of accuracy and fairness, the White House is laughing at its new opportunity to mess with the American people’s heads. While we consider the implications of an era in which everyone has access to a virtual printing press and anyone can be a reporter, the people in the White House press office are busily figuring out how they can dragoon more pseudo-reporters into the front row. While idealists post and fiddle, realists in power are burning down the house.
Accountability is a grand principle. The Eason Jordan story shows us how journalists are still having a hard time getting used to the fact that they are being asked to follow it, too. The Jeff Gannon story shows us how easy it is, once the journalistic establishment has begun its self-destructive implosion, for public officials to engineer a reality that suits their own agenda. To me, that’s the bigger story.