Putin, Bush, Eason Jordan, Dan Rather

[Cocoa]

my email to Dan Froomkin:

Dear Dan,

I'm skeptical about those accounts about the private exchange between Putin and Bush about some fired journalist.

Obviously Bush's reference to that discussion was remarkable, and this discussion thread from Democratic Underground shows that there was interest at the time.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3171298#3176552

But it also shows that no one in the U.S. media looked into what actually was said.

I used "Google News" to try to find if anyone tried to find out, and all I could find was a Russian news outlet, which implied that the question was about Eason Jordan at CNN, not about Dan Rather.

http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=5441851&startrow=1&date=2005-02-24&do_alert=0

That is credible to me for a number of reasons. Presumably the Russian reporter who asked Bush the question was Putin's own Jeff Gannon, a plant who uses a question to help his boss make his point. Likely this Russian news site is part of the same game.

Therefore the question and the story afterwards were likely public extensions of Putin's private remark to Bush.

Also, the Eason story really is a better example of repression of the U.S. press. Jordan made a serious challenge to U.S. policy (there are credible questions about deaths of journalists at the hands of U.S. troops -- Reuters for example demanded an investigation).

The Rather story got a lot more play in the U.S., but I think overseas the Jordan story would be much more significant.

Another thing is the timing. Like I said, there was zero reporting done on this "odd exchange," as you called it, when it happened.

The very first comment on it that I could find (and I was looking) was George Stephanopoulos yesterday, who said it was about Dan Rather.

To me, it looks like the U.S. media took a few days to get its story straight.

[aden_nak]

1. I believe Putin mentioned "those reporters on CBS".

But don't quote me just because I quoted them. ;)