JournoList: Liberal media conspiracy?

Finally—proof that the media is riddled with liberal bias, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. The “smoking gun” comes in the form of leaked e-mails from an invitation-only chat room called JournoList, organized by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein for fellow liberals in the media, the blogosphere, and academia. A new conservative website named The Daily Caller has obtained a trove of e-mails from the 400 members of JournoList, and their conversations reek like “an overripe diaper.” The e-mails—filled with smug condescension toward conservatives and Republican politicians—reveal the media actively conspiring in 2008 to protect Barack Obama from the scandal over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and to create a “line” to discredit Sarah Palin. This wasn’t journalism—it was propaganda, said Fred Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. “Those involved in JournoList considered themselves part of a team,” and their goal was to make sure Obama won.

That’s a deliberate distortion, said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. In an irresponsible attempt to create a scandal, The Daily Caller has “cherry-picked” a handful of the 25,000 e-mails from JournoList, focusing on those from openly liberal opinion writers for The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Huffington Post, with the vehement disagreements that occurred daily in the chat group edited out. The full transcripts reveal not a grand conspiracy to create a single, party line, but a fractious group of policy wonks trading ideas and gossip at a virtual water cooler. When one UCLA professor wondered if the government could “shut down Fox News” for shoddy journalism, Time’s Michael Scherer shot back: “You really want political parties/white houses picking and choosing which news organizations to favor?” Does that sound like a conspiracy?

Call it what you will—JournoList was a dumb idea, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com, and I’m glad Klein has shut it down. Some of the contributors were partisans who saw the Democratic Party as “we,” and tried to convince columnists to “ignore” the Rev. Wright story, and to call conservatives “racists” purely as a political strategy. That kind of cynical sophistry is the inevitable result of belonging to a smug, secretive clique. Liberals often justifiably accuse Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the conservative media of “groupthink”—but if they think they’re immune to it, they’re kidding themselves.

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