Internet killed the video star?(Beat the Press)

Only two weeks after the Eason Jordan saga came to an end with the resignation of the longtime top CNN executive, Daily Variety reported an important postscript: In February, 2005, the Network That Ted Turner Built saw a 21 percent drop in its prime-time ratings from the same period a year ago.

For the establishment press, blaming pajama-clad bloggers for the demise of news icons like Jordan and Dan Rather has been a convenient way to shift responsibility. We're not the problem, they say. It's those nasty cyber-assassins who destroy good and decent professionals.

But the ratings tell another story. While bloggers no doubt hastened Jordan's downfall, his dismissal was just the final step in a broader process of disillusionment. It was a more far-flung and motley grouping who fired Eason Jordan: the American viewing public--which has grown tired of media elitism and bias.

Jordan created a row at February's World Economics Forum in Davos, Switzerland when he pushed the scurrilous--and utterly unsubstantiated--charge that American troops deliberately target and kill Western reporters in Iraq. He artlessly tried to back down from the comment almost as soon as he made it, but he never went so far as to offer an unconditional apology, which is why he ultimately couldn't extricate himself from the flap that would ruin him.

Jordan says he quit his CNN post of his own volition, but few observers take that claim at face value. Establishment-media organs have turned his removal into an object lesson on the supposed crimes, excesses, and undue power of the blogging class. In the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw grumbled that "when these bloggers rise up in arms, grown men weep--and news executives cave in." That, he says, is "much more alarming than anything Jordan said." On "CBS Sunday Morning," David Gergen warned of "a temptation for bloggers to act like vigilantes, hanging a public figure without a fair trial.... I believe that happened in the Eason Jordan case."

Well, at least bloggers can no longer gripe that the mainstream media (MSM) don't take them seriously--they've got the press believing they're serial giant-killers.

But are they? Yes, it was the blogosphere that exposed Jordan's odious remark, and it was bloggers who pilloried him, CNN, and the whole of MSM for ignoring the ...