February 8, 2005

Easongate: Lost in The Storm

Today's Tennessean has a letter to the editor relevant to the Eason Jordan scandal. Here's the link (it's the fifth letter down). Tennessean reader John Barton writes:

An Internet search for Eason Jordan's statement about soldiers targeting journalists in Iraq produces several hundred hits for conservative blog sites. Once the bloggers have whipped the Internet into a frenzy, conservative publications such as The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal pick up the story and put it into the mainstream.

Lost in that storm is Eason Jordan's own clarification of the context of his statement: that he was arguing that the deaths of the journalists were not cases of collateral damage, but mistaken identity. The journalists were aimed at and shot, not because they were journalists, but because they were mistaken for the enemy.

Barton would know that if he had actually followed the story on those conservative blogs he so dislikes. Because it is the blogs and not Eason Jordan and CNN and the mainstream media that are getting to the truth of this story. The worst part is, readers have only been told the Eason Jordan story in a conservative columnist's column and a liberal reader's letter to the editor, and not inthe full and complete airing in the news pages that the story - and the newspaper's readers - deserve.