AP is reporting that CNN news executive Eason Jordan quits:

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq.

Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy.

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted.

He quickly backed off the remarks, explaining that he meant to distinguish between journalists killed because they were in the wrong place where a bomb fell, for example, and those killed because they were shot at by American forces who mistook them for the enemy.

"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," Jordan said in a memo to fellow staff members at CNN.

But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up. There was an online petition calling on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists.

Meanwhile, Power Line notes:

The AP can't resist getting this part of the story wrong:

But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up.

Actually, of course, the videotape "turned up," but the Davos folks decided to keep it under wraps, apparently in an effort to help Jordan. Jordan's problem wasn't confusion about what he said; his problem was CNN's inability to create confusion about what he said.

You may not have heard it here first, but you did hear it here. On February 7, I wrote: "This story is playing out in excruciatingly slow motion, but the ending has already been written: Eason Jordan is finished."