Journolist is an awkward name for a very troubling phenomenon. Evidently for years a large proportion of our "Main Stream Journalists" have been colluding on stories, tactics and media strategy via a listserv. Most troubling, they seem to have actively coordinated to promote or kill stories based upon whether those stories would help Barack Obama's election chances. In other words, they were doing precisely what the more 'wild eyed' conservatives have been claiming: engaging in a conspiracy to slant news coverage to aid the political fortunes of liberals and Democrats. Once again an 'institution' that has demanded our respect and honor turns out to be an exploitative fraud. I'm saying this so often that I think I'll just abbreviate: Ex-Fraud. That covers most of government, the news media, the entertainment and education borgs as well as our legal establishment. The hippies had it wrong: it's not 'don't trust anyone over 30', it's 'don't trust anyone who claims to providing a public service'. Jim Geraghty has much, much more.
I am told by lefties who were on the old Journo-List how boring it was. How it was mostly about baseball and movies and books and all kinds of topics, and how controversial, incendiary, or scandalous comments were few and far between.
But every time we get a leak from the archives, we see guys who have respected reputations -- at least among the mainstream media -- suddenly throwing tantrums that would leave John McEnroe telling them to grow up. As noted yesterday, between Weigel's talk of setting Matt Drudge on fire, Ezra Klein's off-color recommendation for Tim Russert, Spencer Ackerman fantasizing about putting conservatives through plate-glass windows, and the latest edition of an NPR producer fantasizing about Rush Limbaugh's death, I don't know whether these guys are just talking tough because they're typing in front of a screen, or whether they really have rage issues and violent fantasies that ought to be a concern.
Guess who wrote the following: "What's depressing is the way in which liberal journalists are not responding to events in order to find out the truth, but playing strategic games to cover or not cover events and controversies in order to win a media/political war. The far right is right on this: this collusion is corruption. It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism -- but it is nonetheless corrupt. Having a private journalistic list-serv to debate, bring issues to general attention, notice new facts seems pretty innocuous to me. But this was an attempt to corral press coverage and skew it to a particular outcome." Ready? Andrew Sullivan.
Ed Morrissey lays out how we're watching any benefit of the doubt burn to cinders: "Ackerman wasn't talking about a strategy to exposerealracists, in the media or anywhere else. The Washington Independent reporter wanted to conduct a campaign against any figure on the Right, including journalists like Fred Barnes, to smear him as a racist for the political purposes of electing a Democrat to the White House. Notice that Ackerman doesn't even bother to ask people to look for actual evidence of racism, but just suggests [picking] a conservative name out of a hat. Tellingly, the pushback from members of Journolist had less to do with the outrageous idea of smearing an innocent person of racism to frighten people away from the story than with whether it would work. Mark Schmitt, now at American Prospect, warned that it 'wouldn't further the argument' for Obama, and Kevin Drum objected because playing racial politics would 'probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly.' It certainly puts efforts by the Left to paint the Tea Party as racist in an entirely new light. It also calls into question the ethics and judgment of anyone who participated in that Ackerman thread. Finally, this first entry in the Journolist exposés -- Tucker Carlson promises more to come -- shows that far from being a benign place to have chats among colleagues, Journolist also served as a place for journalists to plot against their political opponents and strategize to twist the news and propose smear campaigns."
At Legal Insurrection, William Jacobson concludes: "The story is not just that liberal journalists are a bunch of conspiring liars and frauds. The real story is that liberal journalists manipulated the 2008 election by actively campaigning in secret for Barack Obama, and stifling debate on critical issues by smearing opponents as racist. This is no joke. We now are paying the price, both in the destruction of our economy and standing in the world, and the continued race-card playing antics of groups like Think Progress and the NAACP. The race card tactic was so successful in 2008, that it is being tried again and again. Don't get mad, get even . . . at the polls. Remember November."
At midnight, the Daily Caller revealed NPR producer Sara Spitz talking about how she would enjoy watching Rush Limbaugh die of a heart attack, and Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, and John Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, talking about whether the federal government should try to shut down Fox News Channel by having the Federal Communications Commission "pull their broadcasting permit once it expires."
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