I think the Times handled that about right (they ran Jordan's piece on their Op-Ed page): I'm sure people at the NY Times have also been in the position Eason Jordan and (actually) his line editors.

I've been in a similar, though never-quite-as-dire a spot, when I worked on various photo desks, where we had people in Russia during the revolution, Nicaragua, the Philippines under Marcos etc. etc.

A slip-up could literally cost someone you know, and whose wife and kids you know, and likely talk with on the phone every day, their life. The rule in every newsroom, when rebels or whoever had your people and were making demands, was 'the people come first'.

Think about that. What if someone had called you, a software developer, a few years back and said, say, "We have your colleague and his family: we will torture and kill them unless you delay the roll-out of the product".

What would you do? Take the 'high' road, and ship? What would you say to the colleague's parents afterwards? "He was a great guy, his wife was charming, but programming principals dictated I ship code... My deep sympathies"? How would you have lived with yourself?

Journalism is a dirty business, and it is full of dirty deals. The geniuses out there, and we're talking about smart, dedicated people who choose to work daily in shit piles, manage to keep their eye on a greater good, and that's an ever-shifting and ephemeral beacon. (Really sounds a bit like software development, doesn't it?).

Eason Jordan made the same devil's deal that every medium that had reporters inside Iraq made, he was just the unlucky guy who had to actually live up to the terms. If he, and CNN, were complete slime, they would have let that story die with Saddam's regime: but they didn't.
Comments 11:22:43 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures