Tales of the Coming Media Powershift

There is something in the virtual air and the winds of change seem to be blowing harder out of that growing division of cyberspace known as the blogosphere. I am, of course, referring to the MSM (mainstream media) scandal known as “Easongate” (will that “-gate” suffix ever be excised from the national vocabulary?), which has lead to the resignation of CNN chief news executive, Eason Jordan, who fell victim to not only his own misstatements but also to what has come to be known as either a blogswarm or a blogstorm (there is some dispute as the font of blogmemes is overflowing these days), after he said, during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last month, that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been “targeted.”

Although Mr. Jordan quickly backed away from his remarks, saying that he had misspoken and that he never believed that coalition troops in Iraq had targeted jounalists, his clarifications came too late to prevent the controversey. Blogger Rony Abovitz was in attendance at the January 27, 2005 World Economic Forum panel discussion entitled, “Will Democracy Survive the News?” when Mr. Jordan leveled his accusations, “Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park.” Mr. Abovitz reported in a blog entry dated January 28, 2005, “Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real ’sh–storm.’ What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd. The other looming shadow on what was going on was the presence of a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator in the middle of some very serious accusations about the U.S. military.”

Bloggers Spring into Action

The events that followed were nothing short of amazing. A few bloggers picked up on Mr. Abovitz’s story and refused to let it die, which got the attention of hundreds of other bloggers who began pounding away at their keyboards. Soon after, Bill Roggio of The Fourth Rail created the group blog Easongate to collect information related to Mr. Jordan’s statements, provide analysis of the developing story, advocate that CNN take disciplinary action against Mr. Jordan, offer an online petition for the public to express its displeasure and gather information about CNN’s advertising clients. N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear also pitched in with an Easongate tracker. All of this ultimately lead to Mr. Jordan’s resignation from CNN after 23 years at the network, “to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq.” Mr. Jordan wrote in a letter to collegues.

Was Easongate another “Rathergate” (what is so appealing about that -gate meme)? On the surface, it might appear as such because this was indeed another case of bloggers causing enough of a stir in cyberspace to get the attention of the MSM. However, there are some troubling dissimilarities. Rathergate was a scandal that involved journalists using forged documents as supporting “evidence” in a television newsmagazine story which was broadcast over the public airwaves — a grave violation of journalistic ethics and public trust. Contrast that with the fact that Mr. Jordan did not fabricate proof and admitted that he didn’t have any. While it is clearly unethical to make accusations without proof, that same lack of evidence relegates such accusations to the far less credible status of conjecture. It is also important to note that Mr. Jordan did not broadcast his specualtions over the public airwaves and that there is currently no definitive account of what Mr. Jordan said at the World Economic Forum that has been made public, including the videotape of the forum’s off-the-record session. This is significant not because it calls into question what Mr. Jordan might have said or not said, but because whatever he said was clearly not intended as a news report produced for mass public consumption.

Was Easongate “Blog Storm Troopers or Pack Journalism at its Best,” as Jay Rosen of PressThink asks in his February 10, 2005 article? That seems to depend upon the points-of-view of the people making those evaluations. Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review’s CJR Daily emailed Jay Rosen, “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail. (Where is Jimmy Stewart when we need him ?) This convinces me more than ever that Eason Jordan is guilty of one thing, and one thing only — caring for the reporters he sent into battle, and haunted by the fact that not all of them came back. Like Gulliver, he was consumed by Lilliputians.” On the other hand, Hugh Hewitt wrote, in a February 11, 2005 blog entry, on HughHewitt.com, “The trouble was the cover-up –which continues– and the pattern of innuendo and reckless charges which Eason Jordan and CNN had laid down vis-a-vis the military, especially the charge Jordan made about the American military torturing journalists from last fall. The press is now fully alerted to the story. Perhaps they will ask the still relevant tough questions of Jordan and CNN.”

Has the blogosphere imposed accountability on the mainstream media, as “Captain Ed” of Captain’s Quarters submitted in his congratulatory post-Eason-resignation article entitled, “The Moral Of Eason’s Fables?” Perhaps, to some extent, it has. In a February 12, 2005 blog entry called, “The End of Honest Mistakes?” Garrett Graff of FishbowlDC writes, “We now (sic) entering an age where journalists are so closely scrutinized by thousands of people with almost limitless time and limitless research power that the slightest misstep can end a distinguished career.”

But others are not so certain. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online wrote in his February 11, 2005 blog entry, “A Shocking, Sudden End to Eason Jordan Story,” “I would have preferred the tape come out, and that the public’s reaction to what Jordan said and didn’t say determine just what consequences, if any, he deserved. But he did not escape accountability, which is what I was expecting the past couple days. And we learned that a lot of people in major media institutions thought this was a tempest in a teacup, unworthy of even a paragraph of coverage.” And Jude Nagurney Camwell of The American Street offered this assesment, “The �Right-wing mouth machine� would like us all to think that Eason Jordan was ‘bad’ and ‘unAmerican’ for saying what he said. CNN has been complicit by their reticence to talk about tough issues. They wound up to be the biggest loser. They lost Eason Jordan. Eason was guilty before being proven innocent by no other process except one: the blog-trial.”

“Gannongate”

Of course, any discussion of partisan conspiracies must also include a reference to “Gannongate” (again with the -gate thing). James Dale Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, is the reporter who became the target of online scrutiny by a group of bloggers who were suspicious of the “softball” questions he asked at White House press conferences.

Further investigation revealed Mr. Gannon’s (Guckert’s) real name and the address where his Internet domain was registered. Also discovered was that the domain names, hotmilitarystud.com, militaryescort.com, and militaryescortm4m.com (which are either inactive or require a password to access), web sites apparently devoted to gay pornography, were registered through Mr. Guckert’s domain. Soon after these allegations and revelations came to the light of the blogosphere and subsequently the MSM, Mr. Gannon abruptly quit TalonNews.com, a conservative web site that has published articles referring to ”the homosexual agenda.”

Has the blogosphere changed the shape of “reporting,” setting a precedent for anyone, informed or not, to publish for the world, as Abigail Tucker and Stephen Kiehl wrote in a February 10, 2005 Baltimore Sun article? Apparently, the answer to that question depends upon the political leanings of both the subject of the controversey and those investigating it.

In his February 10, 2005 column entitled “The Destruction of Jeff Gannon,” Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media writes, “Left-wing bloggers have now made a name for themselves, and it is not pretty. They have taken the scalp of an on-line conservative journalist by the name of Jeff Gannon, who was virtually unknown until about three weeks ago. His crimes were that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats.” However, Meteor Blades writes in a February 12, 2005 DailyKOS diary entry called “Of muckrakers, blograkers, and future investigations,” “As with so much in the blogworld, the investigation by Daily Kos Diarists and Media Matters that just popped Mr. Guckert out of his propaganda post as Karl Rove’s pull-string doll arose and evolved and came to spectacular fruition at warp speed.”

An Assessment

In order to make a “fair and balanced” assessment of how bloggers figured into these controversies, it is important to evaluate each example without consideration for partisanship, even if the motivations of many of the parties involved appear to be partisan. If political bias is allowed to color our perceptions of the seekers of truth and justice, then our perceptions of truth and justice will be likewise colored in the same fashion, which leaves all of us — regardless of politics — lost and confused about where to look for truth and justice.

There is still some specualtion about what Mr. Jordan actually said at the World Economic Forum as no tapes or transcripts have been made public. However, there were plenty of eyewitnesses — including U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) and U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) — to corroborate the general context of Mr. Jordan’s assertions with regard to the deaths of journalists covering the war in Iraq. And they can’t all have been blinded by partisanship.

Some might call Easongate a case of partisans smelling enemy blood in the water, and to some extent that appears to have been one of the motivating factors which caused that group of bloggers to stay on the story until they could affect what they perceived to be their delivery of truth and justice (we will never be certain of how hard those bloggers might have looked for evidence that Mr. Jordan was telling the truth). However, the ethical implications of making accusations without proof have nothing to do with partisanship and everything to do with truth and justice.

Mr. Jordan’s allegations vis-a-vis U.S. and coalition troops targeting journalists were quite serious and it was irresponsible for him to make them without proof because it cost him not only his own personal credibility, but some of CNN’s as well. Although Mr. Jordan has resigned from CNN, his former collegues and other journalists will have to endure even more scrutiny, especially when they file reports about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of journalists killed while covering Iraq.

The efforts of the bloggers covering Easongate were truly impressive. They were well-organized and very efficient in their tracking of the developing story and they served the truth with effective reporting. But I am failing to understand how justice was served because while Easongate was ignited by Mr. Jordan’s submission of allegations without proof, it was the bloggers’ coverage of Easongate that provided the fuel to keep the controversey going and growing. And to what end? Mr. Jordan resigned from CNN and, with his experience and expertise, will likely find another job soon (and probably write a book too). Meanwhile, the Easongate bloggers took the credit for that development, putting themselves into the roles of central characters in the story, which makes that part of the Easongate saga seem more like a tale of vigilantism than one of justice served.

The blogger coverage of Gannongate appears to have fallen victim to partisan spin that spun out of control. In their zeal to discredit Mr. Guckert/Gannon, the bloggers covering him got caught up in a salacious sidestory and lost sight of the most important issue which was suspicion that the White House might be engaging in the manipulation of the press — a most grave breech of our founding principles, if it is true — not that Mr. Guckert/Gannon used a pseudonym (Gannon does roll off the tongue easier than Guckert) or registered domains for gay pornography sites after having written anti-gay articles.

Certainly, the charge of hypocrisy is quite serious, but it really only affects Mr. Guckert/Gannon’s credibility and conscience and Mr. Guckert/Gannon will likely disappear into oblivion (perhaps to write a book about his experiences) while the question of possible White House manipulation of the press — which could affect all of us — remains unanswered due to an apparent lack of interest. Meanwhile, if the allegations against the White House are true, there are likely dozens of other James Guckerts/Jeff Gannons lining up to take his place right now and bloggers and other jounalists who are still interested in that story will have to start gathering data and examining press conference transcripts all over again.

The Future

These events could portend an explosive upheaval of the mainstream media and journalism as we know it and only time will tell if the MSM, keenly aware of how closely they are being monitored by the blogosphere, will be inspired to produce more focused and thorough news coverage or be intimidated into narrowing their coverage in order to reduce the risk of controversey. Blogs could possibly become biggest thing to happen to journalism since the invention of television, but only if we bloggers hold ourselves up to the same standards of credibility and accountability that we currently expect of the MSM, which means that we must do our level best to remain unbiased and to report the facts fairly and accurately — even if we do not care for what they might reveal or the controversies they may cause — and reserve the partisanship for op/ed articles.

With the convergence of communications technologies causing the media sands to shift inside and outside of cyberspace, the awsome power of the blogosphere has the potential to change the way we view the news and the world, for better or worse. We can build bridges and communities and through cooperation become more effective at seeking truth and justice or we can isolate ourselves into cynical partisan clusters in which we preach to our own little choirs and trash anyone and anything we do not like without ever being challeged by opposing viewpoints. The choice is ours.