CNN executive quits over remarks

WASHINGTON — CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned last night in an effort to quell a bubbling controversy over his remarks about U.S. soldiers killing journalists in Iraq.

No definitive account of what Jordan said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 27 has been made public.

Two congressional Democrats who were there, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, criticized Jordan's remarks. Others in attendance, including U.S. News & World Report editor-at-large David Gergen, said Jordan had corrected his initial remarks.

Frank has said that it sounded as if Jordan "was saying it was official military policy to take out journalists." But Jordan later "modified" his remarks to say some U.S. soldiers did this "maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger," Frank said.

In an interview this week, Jordan said he had been responding to Frank's comment that the 63 journalists killed in Iraq were "collateral damage."

"I was trying to make a distinction between 'collateral damage' and people who got killed in other ways," he said. Jordan cited such 2003 incidents as the U.S. shelling of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, a haven for foreign journalists, in which two cameramen were killed, and the fatal shooting of a cameraman outside Abu Ghraib prison.

Jordan was being pounded by bloggers, liberals as well as conservatives, who provided the rocket fuel for a story that otherwise might have fizzled.

Jordan, 44, said in a statement that he was quitting 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. ... I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise."

Several CNN staffers say Jordan, who was distraught about the controversy, saw the handwriting on the wall in tendering his resignation. But top executives are also said to have lost patience with the continuing gossip about Jordan, including his affair with Marianne Pearl, widow of the murdered reporter Daniel Pearl, and subsequent marital breakup.

Blogs operated by National Review Online, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt and commentator Michelle Malkin were among those that began slamming Jordan last week after a Davos attendee posted an online account, but the establishment media was slow to pick up on the controversy.

Jordan touched off a furor with a New York Times op-ed piece in April 2003 in which he wrote that CNN had withheld information about some of Saddam Hussein's abuses out of concern for its Iraqi employees in Baghdad, prompting criticism that the network was collaborating with a murderer's regime to maintain its access.