At Editor and Publisher, Thomas Lipscomb has a good piece on the lessons mainstream media refuses to learn: Why Rathergate and Easongate Are Still Open.

CBS at least took the trouble to create an elaborate illusion of a deliberative evaluation. And it concluded from the Richard Thornburgh-Louis Boccardi report that a few firings and careful adherence in the future to its own standards and practices was all that was required. Time Warner’s CNN didn’t bother.

In that case, the issue was simple enough. Did or didn’t Eason Jordan state, at the off-the-record World Economic Forum Conference in Davos, Switzerland, on January 27, something remotely like the charge that U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq and killed a dozen of them or so? It didn’t matter what the opinions of Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, or the blogger attendee who spilled the beans, Rony Abovitz, thought. It doesn’t even matter what Jordan said about what he said. And it doesn’t matter if he apologized for it or not. The World Economic Forum had videotaped the “off the record” meeting. All CNN and Jordan had to do was to ask the tape be released.

Instead distinguished media talking heads like Tom Johnson embarrassed themselves in displays of speculative open mindedness only possible among the empty-headed. There was nothing to talk about.

Not only was there a tape, but CNN admits it never asked for it, as CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney has revealed to me. There was no problem with getting a copy of the notorious “off the record” tape from the World Economic Forum. When I asked WEF’s Klaus Schwab whether he would have made a tape available, cut to just Eason Jordan’s remarks, and give it to Jordan and CNN, he replied: “Of course. And they could make any distribution of it they wished.”

CNN had the power and the obligation to release the tape as a news organization. That responsibility was its bond to the public trust. If the head of its news department had gone off his head, firing him and getting back to basics would help to keep that trust intact. Why wouldn’t CNN, like Dan Rather, want to “break that story?”