This dynamite story from The Daily Caller (WARNING: LANGUAGE) puts a lie to the claim, from Washington Post bloggerkind Ezra Klein, that the secretive, Beltway-centric left-wing group Journolist was little more than
An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another. The eventual irony of the list was that it came to be viewed as a secretive conspiracy, when in fact it was always a fractious and freewheeling conversation meant to open the closed relationship between a reporter and his source to a wider audience.
Conservatives always suspected that the “secretive conspiracy” description was closer to the truth, and this thread leaked by liberal blogger Mickey Kaus (WARNING: LANGUAGE) certainly reinforced those suspicions.
Daily Caller provides plenty more ammo. The online publication got hold of conversations that took place among Journolisters when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright brouhaha flared up in 2008.
According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate [Barack Obama]. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama?s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama?s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, ?Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares ? and call them racists.?
Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: ?Listen folks ? in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn?t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.?
Ah yes. It’s all about “the people.”
Read the whole thing, as they say. And keep in mind how the left used manufactured and overheated rhetoric to serve a political cause in this instance. And how similarly coordinated (and inauthentic) messages might be deployed today, and in future debates about K-12 education in Wake County and elsewhere in North Carolina, as John Hood noted in this morning’s Daily Journal.
