The Daily Caller, a
Web-based news outlet with a conservative political slant,
has been having a field day lately, quoting from posts on a
listserv called the Journolist.
A listserv is an e-mail-driven communication tool used by
people with a common interest. When a member posts a comment
to the listserv's e-mail address, it is then distributed to
all of the other members by e-mail.
The Journolist, started in 2007 by liberal Washington Post
blogger Ezra Klein, linked several hundred journalists,
political operatives and eggheads, until The Daily Caller
started making public the things they had been saying to one
another.
Their common interest was Barack Obama -- ensuring his
election, promoting his agenda and savaging his critics.
The Journolist is no more. The political operatives got
away unscathed and the eggheads are safe in their
classrooms, but the journalists deservedly have egg on their
faces.
You know you've got the drop on a liberal newsie when she's
compelled to say something like, "I made poorly considered
remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private
e-mail discussion group from my personal e-mail account."
That would be Journolist member Sarah Spitz, a producer for
public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., who posted a little fantasy
about how much she would enjoy watching the conservative
talk radio host die of a heart attack.
She said she would "laugh loudly like a maniac and watch
his eyes bug out."
And here we thought that hate -- the very word Spitz used
to describe her own feelings about Limbaugh later in her
post -- was the exclusive property of the right. Postings on
the Journolist prove otherwise.
While Journolist members were discussing strategies for
suppressing news about Obama's America-bashing pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., during the presidential campaign,
Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent and now
of Wired magazine, suggested this:
"It's not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright's defense.
What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going
after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic]
and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot
of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to
let the right know that it needs to live in a state of
constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically."
Obviously.
Everyone on the listserv felt much better
after Obama won. There were tears (rhetorical, one
presumes), cheers, f-bombs of happiness and lots of
backslapping among Journolist members for a job well done.
And what members of the general public didn't know wouldn't
hurt them.
Oops.
You still may have to snoop around a bit to find the
Journolist story. Not all of America's newspapers, for
instance, seem to think it's worthy of any mention. But it's
out there and it's not going away. The Daily Caller seems to
be milking it for all it's worth -- and good for The Daily
Caller.
It does make the questions at public gatherings a little
harder for responsible journalists to answer, though.
Here's the situation as I see it, having spent 30 years in
journalism -- and every day of those 30 years far out of
step with the predominant political culture of my workplace:
The problem is not that the mainstream media try to keep
conservatives out. Nobody asks an entry-level applicant for
a reporting job about his or her politics. It just doesn't
matter.
The problem is that, because of what they read and what
they see, conservatives perceive the media environment as
uninviting or even hostile, so they find something else to
do with their talents.
The left-wing bias that results is unintentional and
passive -- and thus in no way comparable to the active
discussion of strategy and tactics on view in the Journolist
postings.
It's impossible to say how much influence the Journolist
posters had in creating a favorable public perception of
Obama and shouting down his critics. They certainly didn't
hurt him.
But the cloud they have cast over journalism has a silver
lining. The revelation of their scheming will make at least
a few more people question the quality of their news in a
country that desperately needs more skeptics.
