With the weekend coming to a close, journalists are weighing in on CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s resignation.

Cathy Young, a Reason contributing editor who wrote this for the Boston Globe, came to the same conclusions I did:

Jordan’s downfall also attests to the rising power of the ‘’new media”: the Internet weblogs. The bloggers broke this story, and kept it going when the mainstream media wouldn’t cover it. Many of those bloggers undoubtedly had an ideological agenda, but the fact is that they did some solid reporting — and that some of their information came from liberals such as Representative Frank. In some quarters of the blogosphere, Jordan’s resignation was met with an unpleasant ‘’we got him!” gloating; but ‘’gotcha” journalism is hardly limited to blogs. Like other media, the blogs can be vehicles for vendettas and witch-hunts — as well as a tool for openness and accountability.

Mainstream journalists should resist the temptation to view Jordan as a victim of a right-wing lynch mob. His fatal wound was ultimately self-inflicted. And, if the ‘’old media” don’t learn some lessons from this incident, there will be more such wounds.

The New York Times wrote a comprehensive piece that pleasantly surprised me for its balance (after all, it’s the Times we’re talking about here).

As an interesting aside, the piece labels “conservatives” six times, twice in one sentence. I don’t seem to mind the Times’ labeling bias these days. If they want to brand the word “conservative” as searching for truth and not putting up with intellectual fraud masquerading as legitimate news, I’m all for it.

But before you start surfing the Web for both sides of Easongate, Bill at INDC Journal reminds us that Jordan should have been fired long ago, and he uses Jordan’s own words to prove his point:

[Jordan said the following at a 1999 Harvard lecture] “So it’s tremendously difficult for us, as it would be tremendously difficult for any news organization, reporting on a regime like the Iraqi regime, when you know your own reporting is being seen by those very same people. Most news organizations don’t have that problem, but we are trying to make the best of an extremely challenging situation. And if there’s any proof that we’re compromising our journalistic standards as part of that process, I would love to know about it, because that’s totally unacceptable. ”

Considering what he admitted after the war [that CNN hushed up Hussein’s atrocities to maintain access], it looks like his own stated consequences belatedly caught up with him. Eason Jordan had a credibility problem.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin weighs in on the MSM’s huffing and puffing, and as usual, scores a direct hit.