Well, Greater Wingnuttia is in an uproar over the revelation that there was an private email list, “JournoList,” of 400-or-so liberal bloggers, reporters, writers, editors, and academics. I’m in an uproar, too. Surely, I’m an important media figure, what with a blog that reaches about ten people a day and an editor at two news outfits in Collegeville Bumfuck, Ohio.
So, what gives? Seriously, Ezra Klein started the damn thing, and I link to him ALL THE TIME. JournoList is gone now, but surely JournoList’s new incarnation “CabaList” (great name, btw) could include me. I await your email, Mr. Klein.
In all seriousness, though, I feel like Will Ferrel’s character in Zoolander. Have I been taking crazy pills? I honestly don’t understand the hubbub over this list, which, if you’ve been reading conservative blogs (and why would you do that?), you’d think is a cross a Marxist political rally and the cabal from The X-Files. Says Jonathan Strong at The Daily Caller:
In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.
But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents
revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.
In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.
Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.
Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.
I guess that's supposed to be shocking and/or freightening. It's certainly supposed to be evidence for Strong's claim that "an influential left-wing faction of the media [is] participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias."
Of course, it's none of those things. It's Spencer Ackerman, who is a liberal blogger, bitching about the Jerimiah Wright coverage to a bunch of other liberal bloggers and reporters, which isn't that strange.
And as best I can tell, the "open plotting" and "collusion" involved a few (not all 400, not even close) bitching about how they would like to change the coverage of the Wright scandal. Indeed, by Strong's own lights, we're talking about, at most a dozen-or-so well-known liberal columnists and bloggers discussing ways to change the narrative.
What does Strong think? Does he honestly believe that Ezra frickin' Klein is giving marching orders to 400 journalists? that after hearing Ackerman's master strategy, the entire media changed course? I've yet to see a shred of evidence indicating that it went any further than a few people bitching.
And then there's the charge that JournoList is somehow in cahoots with the Obama administration, even though there is--by these guys' own lights!--no indication that anyone actually employed by the Obama administration was active in the list at the time they were employed--one of Klein's rules for JournoList.
There are, I guess, a number of emails on the list that included strident defenses of Obama, and urged others to defend him too--which is exactly what a lot of liberals do all the time. Indeed, Obama sends me emails encouraging me to support him. It's a conspiracy I suppose. Think of all those press releases! Finally, proof of a liberal media conspiracy!
All the hubbub, all the utterly bizarre demands that all JournoList members and their associates ought to be named and shamed is really, at it's core, incredulity on the part of conservatives that liberals talk to each other and bitch to each other like normal people.
Indeed, it seems to me that, even if the "straight" journalists (i.e. people whose writing is actually supposed to be neutral) were writing about their support for Obama--and there's no evidence that they were--that's not exactly a big deal. Except for the inevitable question-raising, I haven't seen--despite a couple hours of paging through the swamp that is the conservative blogosphere--any evidence that their journalism was actually affected by their evil email list.
Are we supposed to somehow prevent journalists from having and discussing their private opinions? Perhaps they should be required to publicly post their dinner-time conversations, so that we are sure that they're not saying mean things and discussing politics with their families.
Amanda Marcotte agrees it's high time that we ensure liberals have no opinions:
The fundamental argument justifying the fit is that liberal journalists don’t have a right to speak to each other in confidence, a right that conservatives apparently get to enjoy on the grounds that they’re specialer than us. I imagine that if this all works out for them, they’ll be delighted to know they have a new line of attack on liberals. It’s way more than listservs, after all. Liberals communicate with each other in private in all sorts of ways. Now that they’ve managed to make this fact controversial, there’s no end to the possible scandals. I’ve made a list of what we can expect next, in terms of created controversy.
Scandal will erupt when it’s discovered:
*Many liberals are married to or dating other liberals, which often includes actual sexual congress going on behind closed doors.
*Liberal homes are often installed with telephones, and most phones made from them go unrecorded.
*To make this worse, most liberals nowadays carry their phones with them. At any point in time, they have access to confidential conversations with other people who are often also liberal. And just to add to the wickedness of it all, many also employ text messaging.
*Liberals are permitted to enter restaurants that serve dinner to people without recording their conversations. No doubt many of these liberal take advantage of this to discuss politics over dinner with other liberals.
*Did you know there’s no law against liberals having cocktail parties?
*To make it even worse, many liberals working in media or politics have offices where they work with other liberals, and therefore have unfettered access to unrecorded conversations with each other.
*But it turns out even those who don’t work in physical proximity with other liberals often use instant messaging services to conduct conversations with each other as if they worked together. Not only does instant messaging create a scandalous veil of privacy over these communications, but it’s also rumored that they use improper grammar and spelling.
*Liberals are permitted to both purchase books written by other liberals or check them out of the library. Either way, they brazenly read those books quietly, and enjoy thoughts about them that they aren’t forced to share with other people.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the only form of communication we’ll be allowed is blogging, but only if every reader reports their thoughts straightaway in comments. Maybe also Facebook, but only if all the privacy controls are turned off. And then they’ll have to create new rules to explain why it’s scandalous to allow us even this.
I'm not sure why I'm writing so much about this. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so fucking crazy that I can't take my eyes off of it.
I mean here's a list of the "known JournoListas" and their associations. Including links that demonstrate that some of them are work for "maoist" publications (the evidence? A House Committee on Unamerican Activities report that calls The Guardian an arm of the Soviet Union. Of course that would make the communists or maybe even Marxists, but certainly not Maoists. Whatever.)
Then there's the utterly bizarre, quasi-anti-semetic stuff:
What’s so funny, in a sick, sad way, is that, looking at the Journolist, it really does seem as if there is Jewish domination of the media — except that the Jews doing the so-called domination are completely in sync politically with Oliver Stone. They’re all left, left and more left. They’re just all too dumb to realize that, when you get as far Left as Stone, the antisemitism stops being coy little references to capitalism, Israeli imperialism and Palestinian victimhood. Instead, it becomes the active antisemitism that travels from Chavez’s attacks on Jewish businesses, to Stalin’s periodic kangaroo court purges and suppression of religion, to Hitler’s final solution. (And I mention those three Leftist antisemites here because Stone specifically speaks of them as either admirable or misunderstood, or both.)
If you want to get away from “Jewish domination” and get into a more balanced media, with representatives of all sectors in American society you have to go to the conservative media. There, you’ll find as mixed a bunch of people as you can ever hope for: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim (a few), male, female, gay, straight, and some I know I’ve forgotten or haven’t even imagined.
I do analytic philosophy. I'm supposed to be able to parse arguments, and I have no idea what this guy's point is.
Of course, the whole thing is ludicrously hypocritical. The conservative media is well-known for their "collusion," which is really just message discipline. It's not that nefarious; it's just that conservatives are really good at hammering on certain issues and talking points at the same time. If you want to read more about that, read this of this.
One conservative actually calls this bullshit out, which is nice to see:
Everyone who has reason to be embarrassed by a direct quote in the Daily Caller's series on Journolist is an openly opinionated commentator. (The one partial exception is Jeffrey Toobin, who presents himself as a middle-of-the-road analyst on CNN, but his weaselly nature has always been pretty obvious.) Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly the same thing -- it's just our emails don't get leaked because we're smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This practice is a double-edged sword -- you get the benefit of idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into groupthink. Liberals seem more prone to the latter failing, but that's more a problem for them than for anyone else, and it's not much of a scandal.
The straight-news reporters who were on Journolist are being accused of being complicit in the partisan hackery they observed (even if they didn't participate in the discussions), but the charge doesn't really wash unless you can look at their work and point out how it is skewed by exposure to liberal conversations. Orrin Judd provides some useful perspective:
[O]ur friend Rick Perlstein was on the list and, in the meantime, he also had his own list of pet conservatives from whom he'd gather the opposing viewpoints. So there's nothing wrong with the list per se. Nor does this seem like a conspiracy to shape the news, no matter how much a few participants might have wished it to be one.
I guess I'll take the knocks in here, as long as I get to take the fact that all the "hyperventilating" on the right is just hypocritical, logic-free, nonsense, which, I suppose, is a pretty good description of the conservative blogosphere.
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