AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Washington

First CBS's Dan Rather, then CNN's Eason Jordan. Internet bloggers have come of age as influential media watchdogs with the rolling of two high-profile news media heads.

Jordan, a top CNN executive responsible for the network's coverage in Iraq, resigned on Friday following remarks suggesting the United States military was deliberately targeting journalists.

The January 27 comments were initially ignored by mainstream reporters but picked up and trumpeted across the internet by an army of bloggers.

Jordan's downfall follows that of veteran CBS TV news anchor Dan Rather, who announced he would resign in March after bloggers exposed documents he used in a report critical of President George W. Bush's National Guard service as forgeries.

Jordan made his controversial remarks while participating in a discussion panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Organisers have not released a transcript of the event.

Jordan acknowledged the remarks were "not as clear as they should have been" but insisted in a statement that he "never meant to imply US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists".

He resigned after two weeks of ferocious criticism on conservative weblogs such as captainsquartersblog.com, nationalreviewonline.com and easongate.com, a slick site dedicated entirely to the controversy.

In the "old days" of just a few years ago media criticism would appear in the monthly Columbia Journalism Review or in specialised newspaper columns, said Paul Grabowicz at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Now such criticism moved at lightning speed and grew so quickly it could not be ignored, he said. And despite the heated rhetoric there was also often solid original reporting.

"The ground is shifting and the media is having a difficult time adjusting," Mr Grabowicz said.

Though many of the blogs attacking Jordan are managed by staunch conservatives, the controversy cannot be written off as a right-wing attack on the "liberal" media.

Two left-leaning Democratic legislators at the Davos event swiftly criticised Jordan's remarks. And his performance defended panel moderator David Gergen, a Republican who worked with the former president George H. Bush.

"They went after him because he is a symbol of a network seen as too liberal by some. They saw blood in the water," Mr Gergen, the editor of US News and World Report, told the Washington Post.

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page at first blasted Jordan but on Monday dismissed the incident as a "kerfuffle".

Jordan "made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may be dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony," the piece read.

The Journal then chastised CNN for failing to show "the good judgment and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs".

Edward Morrisey, also known as "Captain Ed" at captainsquartersblog.com, wrote that bloggers did not want Jordan's head just because he worked for CNN.

"We wanted accountability for a corporate executive that went overseas on multiple occasions to issue slanderous allegations against the US military simply to drum up business and gain a competitive advantage for access in countries already hostile to the US," Morrisey wrote on Monday.

Mainstream journalists aggressively report only on "acceptable targets" that fit their political beliefs such as "the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general", Mr Morrisey wrote, reflecting the views of many conservative blogs.

Blogs have become an important part of internet life, according to two surveys in November by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Some 27 per cent of Internet users read blogs, according to the survey, which reports that some eight million US adults said they had created blogs. Yet despite this influence, 62 per cent of internet users did not know what a blog was, according to the Pew survey.

A separate survey in December by the software company Perseus Development reported that 4.12 million blogs were created last year by the top eight blog-hosting services. But of the 3,600 blogs surveyed, 66 per cent had not been updated in two months, and many had never updated after they were created.