What is JournoList? Who are they?

[TigerPrwn]

JournoList

In a recent column, WaPo's David Weigel issued an apology:


I'm a member of an off-the-record list-serv called "Journolist," founded by my colleague Ezra Klein.


Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list that day -- quotes that I'm told a gossip Web site will post today. I apologize for much of what I wrote, and apologize to readers.

- "This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire."

I apologize to Matt Drudge for this -- I was incredibly frustrated with the amount of hate mail I was getting and lashed out. If he wants to link to this post with some headline accusing me of wishing death on him, I suppose he can do so. But I don't wish that. I was tired, angry, and hyperbolic, and I'm sorry.

- "Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there -- nor in DC at all."

I stand by this -- I was offended by the way that item was written. I do apologize for reacting like this against the entire Washington Examiner, as my gripe was with one reporter, and the person who gave them this item was apologizing to me.

What the heck is JournoList and who are they? Weigel has before made the excuse, after writing his attack piece on the KIDS that Etheridge hugged, that Ben Smith published the Democrat Talking Points regarding the incident, AFTER he wrote his "Etheridge got TMZ'd" column, however, if he is in the JournoList media cartel, we know good and well these "talking points" were circulated WELL before Ben Smith wrote his column.

What the heck is it, and who are they? lol...
Here is an article on the subject:
JournoList wonders who leaked
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39011_Page2.html


"This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire,” he wrote.


And elsewhere: "It's all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn't get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV."


In his apology Thursday, Weigel tried to explain himself (“Paultard,” he argued is “a neologism coined during the 2008 campaign to describe fanatical supporters of Paul”) but the leaked comments played into the suspicions harbored on the right about Weigel’s ability to cover them fairly.

He has had to apologize before for calling opponents of gay marriage “bigots,” and has often taken heat from right-leaning blogs, such as Newsbusters, for another joke he made about Drudge on Twitter.


“It seems like he spends a lot of time apologizing,” said Penny Nance, the chief executive of Concerned Women for America, one of Weigel’s conservative critics. “The problem is Concerned Women for America and other conservatives resent the idea of the Washington Post or other major news affiliates hiring people who hate us to be the ones to report on us. David Weigel has already shown great distaste, if not downright disdain, for conservatives, so it’s difficult for us to take the Post seriously when this is the person the Post hires to cover conservatives.”


But the Post does not seem moved by the criticism. Hiring Weigel – along with Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent – was an effort by the Post to increase the paper’s relevance in the blogosphere and to present new content that Post National Editor Kevin Merida described to POLITICO’s Ben Smith as “a unique space between reporting and commentary.”


The paper seems determined to stand behind Weigel on this one.



What I am wondering, is if anyone knows just what the heck/who it is. I understand that "Ezra" is the name, but I am wondering who runs the game. Thoughts? Comments? Info?

[TigerPrwn]

Interesting, Ezra Klein thinks "smart, ongoing conversation" consists of wishing someone would light themselves on fire, and calling Ron Paul people "Paultards".
It is also pretty obvious that this listserv was used to hone, then distribute Democrat talking points.
It is highly ironic that a whistleblower felt compelled within this bastion of "smart conversation" to leak info. to the public. I kinda love this- a circle jerk group of leftist journalists were exposed to the public, and now they are forced to shut up shop, because they don't know where the leaks are. It's also great that now Journalists, who spend their entire careers trying to "expose" people of all walks of life, have found themselves in our boat. Classic. :D


On Journolist, and Dave Weigel

I began Journolist in February of 2007. It was an idea born from disagreement. Weeks, or maybe months, earlier, I had criticized Time's Joe Klein over some comments he made about the Iraq War. He e-mailed a long and searching reply, and the subsequent conversation was educational for us both. Taking the conversation out of the public eye made us less defensive, less interested in scoring points. I learned about his position, and why he held it, in ways that I wouldn't have if our argument had remained in front of an audience.

The experience crystallized an idea I'd been kicking around for some time. I was on all sorts of e-mail lists, but none that quite got at the daily work of my job: Following policy and political trends in both the expert community and the media. But I always knew how much I was missing. There were only so many phone calls I could make in a day. There were only so many times when I knew the right question to ask. By not thinking of the right person to interview, or not asking the right question when I got them on the phone, or not intuiting that an economist would have a terrific take on the election, I was leaving insights on the table.

That was the theory behind Journolist: 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.

At the beginning, I set two rules for the membership. The first was the easy one: No one who worked for the government in any capacity could join. The second was the hard one: The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left. I didn't like that rule, but I thought it necessary: There would be no free conversation in a forum where people had clear incentives to embarrass each other. A bipartisan list would be a more formal debating society. Plus, as Liz Mair notes, there were plenty of conservative list servs, and I knew of military list servs, and health-care policy list servs, and feminist list servs. Most of these projects limited membership to facilitate a particular sort of conversation. It didn't strike me as a big deal to follow their example.

But over the years, Journolist grew, and as it grew, its relative exclusivity became more infamous, and its conversations became porous. The leaks never bothered me, though. What I didn't expect was that a member of the list, or someone given access by a member of the list, would trawl through the archives to assemble a dossier of quotes from one particular member and then release them to an interested media outlet to embarrass him. But that's what happened to David Weigel. Private e-mails were twisted into a public story.

In a column about Stanley McChrystal today, David Brooks talks about the union of electronic text, unheralded transparency, 24/7 media and a culture that has not yet settled on new rules for what is, and isn't, private, and what is, and isn't, newsworthy. "The exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important," he writes.

There's a lot of faux-intimacy on the Web. Readers like that intimacy, or at least some of them do. But it's dangerous. A newspaper column is public, and writers treat it as such. So too is a blog. But Twitter? It's public, but it feels, somehow, looser, safer. Facebook is less public than Twitter, and feels even more intimate. A private e-mail list is not public, but it is electronically archived text, and it is protected only by a password field and the good will of the members. It's easy to talk as if it's private without considering the possibility, unlikely as it is, that it will one day become public, and that some ambitious gossip reporters will dig through it for an exposure story. And because that possibility doesn't feel fully real, people still talk like it's private and then get burned if it goes public.

Broadly speaking, neither journalism nor the public has quite decided on how to handle this explosion of information about people we're interested in. A newspaper reporter opposing the Afghanistan war in a news story is doing something improper. A newspaper reporter telling his wife he opposes the war is being perfectly proper. If someone had been surreptitiously taping that reporter's conversations with his wife, there'd be no doubt that was a violation of privacy, and the gathered remarks and observations were illegitimate. If a batch of that reporter's e-mails were obtained and forwarded along? People are less sure what to do about it. So, for now, they use it. Facebook pictures get used too, though there's a bit of shame in it. If the trend continues as it is, people will become much more careful in those forums. For now, we're in an awful transition, where haven't quite adjusted for the public sphere's ability to appropriate the freshly-enlarged private sphere.

It was ironic, in a way, that it would be the Daily Caller that published e-mails from Journolist. A few weeks ago, its editor, Tucker Carlson, asked if he could join the list. After asking other members, I said no, that the rules had worked so far to protect people, and the members weren't comfortable changing them. He tried to change my mind, and I offered, instead, to partner with Carlson to start a bipartisan list serv. That didn't interest him.

In any case, Journolist is done now. I'll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I'm proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will reform it, with many of the same members, and keep it going. Hopefully, it will lose some of its mystique in the process, and be understood more for what it is: One of many e-mail lists where people talk about things they're interested in. But insofar as the current version of Journolist has seen its archives become a weapon, and insofar as people's careers are now at stake, it has to die.

As for Dave, I'm heartbroken that he resigned from The Post. Dave is an extraordinary reporter, and a dear friend. When this is done, there will be a different name on his paychecks, but he will still be an extraordinary reporter, and a dear friend.

By Ezra Klein | June 25, 2010; 3:10 PM ET


He isn't shutting down the list serv, this is a diversion. They are just trying to plug the holes.

[MsDoodahs]

hmmm...they don't know where the leaks are AND he says the archives are putting people's JOBS at stake...:eek:

[TNforPaul45]

I love the point he makes about only being truthful and open with his and his discussants ideas when they are not heard in the public forum. Really helps the case of modern journalism there.

[TigerPrwn]

I think this is the real story here, not that Weigel isn't a conservative.

I guess there have been some leaks in the past, as well as some debate.


JournoList Revealed! Inside the Secret Liberal Media Email Cabal

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Michael Calderone's article on the large, secretive liberal media email group JournoList sparked a lot of debate--some of it in this space--on whether this group is a healthy development for coverage of politics. The debate was necessarily speculative because actual JournoList discussions remained secret. But with more than 300 members of this club, virtually all of them with easy access to the media, did you really think a JournoList thread wouldn't leak? People are rightly interested in learning what goes on behind the scenes at powerful institutions--or wannabe powerful institutions--whose power derives precisely from their decision to exclude the public.

Kausfiles has obtained a copy of one JournoList discussion, focusing on New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (for whom I once worked.) This is not a parody! It's the real thing. I don't know whether or not it is representative. I've edited it only to remove potentially defamatory passages--those cuts are marked--and left out various boilerplate links and commands embedded in the thread, such as "Print" and "Report this message." ... I won't add my own commentary, at least for now. Find your own lede! ... Reminder to JournoList organizer E. Klein, who likes to take it private: All communications are on the record. ...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/03/26/journolist-revealed-inside-the-liberal-media-email-cabal.aspx

The leaked emails are at the link above.

here is a gem:

From: Clay <ris...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:14:57 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:14 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Funny -- under Peter B. (no idea whether this extends to Frank, though
I imagine so) using the term "illegals" was verboten, for obvious
reasons. I guess Marty didn't get the memo. Or, well, you know.
Also, and this is slightly orthogonal to the topic, but Marty's post
demonstrates the accidental danger in praising Latin American
immigrants as driven and hard-working. Logically it makes sense, but
it's also easy for people to draw the false conclusion that anyone who
doesn't immigrate is therefore lazy and stupid.

I guess Peretz isn't part of the list, so he didn't "get the memo". Ya hear that, it is "verboten" to use the term illegals.

[specsaregood]

I hope whomever the leak is, backed up the entire archive. I'd be willing to pay for the whole thing to be put up on wikileaks or something like it. I'd love to see what was said during the 2007 campaign season.

and

It was ironic, in a way, that it would be the Daily Caller that published e-mails from Journolist. A few weeks ago, its editor, Tucker Carlson, asked if he could join the list. After asking other members, I said no, that the rules had worked so far to protect people, and the members weren't comfortable changing them. He tried to change my mind, and I offered, instead, to partner with Carlson to start a bipartisan list serv. That didn't interest him.

Hey Tucker! Publish the entire archive and I'll forgive you for all your past indiscretions!

[MsDoodahs]

I hope whomever the leak is, backed up the entire archive. I'd be willing to pay for the whole thing to be put up on wikileaks or something like it. I'd love to see what was said during the 2007 campaign season.

and


Hey Tucker! Publish the entire archive and I'll forgive you for all your past indiscretions!

Maybe a book is forthcoming...I would not be shocked to hear it.

It would be an instant best seller and the author would be instantly famous.

;)

[TigerPrwn]

I wonder just what the Daily Caller has, or will be given in the future. I hope this is a threat. :D
Patel raises some very good points here. I find it quite disturbing that a lot of journalists whine and cry about these emails being made public, but yet when things are leaked that fit their own idealogical agenda, they praise "transparency". I guess that transparency is only meant for those that are not members of the guild. I'm hoping that this turns in to Journogate rather than Weigelgate. It would be naive to think that the whistleblowers haven't backed up all of the archives. My main issue here is that these people communicate with one another to coridinate their reporting on certain issues- groupthink.

The Daily Caller’s publisher Neil Patel on Dave Weigel, Washington Post and JournoList
By Neil Patel - The Daily Caller | Published: Friday, June 25th, 2010 | Updated: Friday, June 25th, 2010

TheDC’s Jonathan Strong wrote a piece today detailing numerous e-mails sent by Dave Weigel, a reporter who — until he resigned this afternoon — covered the conservative beat for the Washington Post. Strong’s article raises several troubling questions about Weigel himself, his superiors and colleagues at the Washington Post, and the hundreds of so-called objective journalists who are members of the JournoList e-mail group and have been privy to this information for months.[b]

For example:

1) Why did the Washington Post hire someone with uncontrollable disdain for conservatives and Republicans to cover conservatives and Republicans?

When Weigel was hired, the Washington Post issued a press release saying that he had “quite a following and reputation chronicling the conservative movement” and that the paper looked forward to adding his “strong reportorial voice, and insights into the right, to our political coverage, primarily online, as we ramp up for the 2010 midterms.”

[b]Strong’s article today clearly indicates that Weigel was hired to cover a subject he did not respect. Today’s piece also shows that Weigel has the mindset of a profane eighth grader when dealing with political issues. For example, Weigel repeatedly cast Republicans and conservatives as the bad guys, referring to them as “ratfuckers.”

2) How many reporters and editors at the Washington Post were aware of Weigel’s comments on JournoList?

JournoList, the listserv on which Weigel repeatedly insulted conservatives and Republicans, reportedly has more than 400 members. How many of those members currently work for the Washington Post? We know for certain that the listserv was founded by another Washington Post contributor, Ezra Klein. Why did Klein and other JournoList contributors who work for the Washington Post stand by and allow their newspaper’s readers to be conned into thinking that Weigel was an objective reporter with no axe to grind when they knew for a fact that wasn’t true?

3) How does the Washington Post plan on dealing with this issue? Weigel has resigned but the Post still owes its readers an explanation.

When the story about Weigel’s comments about Matt Drudge first appeared on Fishbowl DC, Weigel’s bosses at the Washington Post didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. According to POLITICO, one Washington Post editor said:


Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism …Time to move on.

After today’s reporting by TheDC, does the Washington Post still think this is no big deal? The newspaper’s treatment of the issue so far suggests that conservatives and Republicans have zero reason to trust the newspaper’s reporting going forward.

4) What do all the other so-called objective journalists who are members of JournoList have to say? How can they claim any loose association with the concepts of truth and fairness as they stood by and participated in this fraud?

Few members of JournoList have commented publicly on Weigel to date. One of the few who has anonymously defended him to POLITICO:


Whoever broke the confidentiality of the list obviously has no respect for some pretty basic journalistic norms. But I can’t talk about it because it’s supposed to be confidential. Whoever leaked that is obviously extremely jealous of the exceptional work that Dave is doing for the Post, and whatever Dave said should be viewed in that light.

Excuse me? The Washington Post holds out Weigel as their reporter of choice to cover conservatives and Republicans. Weigel spends all his time going to conservative and Republican events and claiming to be an objective reporter there to cover them fairly. In between these events Weigel goes online and vents on JournoList to 400 other journalists — many who claim to be of the “objective” variety — about just how much he hates those “ratfucker” (his word) conservatives and Republicans. All of the other journalists in the know about this fraud just sit tight and let the fraud continue. Are these the “basic journalistic norms” that those on JournoList are upholding? The reporters on JournoList owe their readers an explanation.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/25/the-daily-callers-publisher-neil-patel-on-dave-weigel-washington-post-and-journolist/

[sailingaway]

I never read frum, but he had something on this today and I actually found value in it. He said there were 'shadow editors' there and it was a disservice to the public because it created groupthink amongst those presenting themselves as independent thinkers. THAT I think is a crime. Snark in private emails should be ignored, generally, imho.

[TigerPrwn]

This shows just how tolerant the bleeding hearts really are, and how closely-knit the journalist bourgeois really are. What bothered me most about Weigel's emails was not the Paultard comment, nor the comments about Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge. What bothered me were these emails:


“I think pointing out Coakley’s awfulness is vital, because it’s 1) true and 2) unreasonable panic about it is doing more damage to the Democrats.”
and

After Sarah Palin claimed Obama’s health care legislation included “death panels” that would ration health care, for instance, the Huffington Post reported that many Americans believed the claim was true. Weigel suggested that reporting on the subject might be counter-productive to liberal policy aims. The Huffington Post, Weigel pointed out, ran “a picture of Sarah Palin, linking to a poll that suggests 45 percent of Americans believe her death panel lie. But as long as the top liberal-leaning news site talks about it every single hour of every day, I’m sure that number will go down.”

“Let’s move the f*** on already,”

All in all, I am glad to know these things about Weigel, and I think others should as well. In the future I will at least know where Weigel is coming from- out of freaking LEFT FIELD. This is blatant propaganda. Weigel is trying to cover up the truth.

A Response to Weigel Resignation Aftermath
By Betsy Rothstein on Jun 26, 2010 09:07 AM
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/sort_of_serious_stuff/a_response_to_weigel_resignation_aftermath_165921. asp

By now, you know that Dave Weigel and the WaPo have parted ways. And by now, you may or may not be aware of the heavy criticism (and more privately, praise) that FishbowlDC has received for first publishing e-mails from Weigel to the private email listserv, Journolist.

MSNBC Keith Olbermann has named me among his "Worst Persons in the World." I was called "Fishbowl F-ck" and a "scumbag" (HuffPost's Jason Linkins). I was called "sleazy" and "skuzzy" and to DIAF (that would be die in a fire (HuffPost's Arthur Delaney). I've been called a "hack" journalist. I've been told I'm the one who should be fired, not Weigel.

The criticisms are missing the mark, but like any journalist, I'm not above rebuke, so allow me here to address the critics:

1.) I have something against Weigel personally.

This is untrue. I had never met Weigel in person until Thursday night at a HuffPost party. We had exchanged a couple of e-mails in the past. He was icy. But I wasn't surprised, hurt, or offended. A little background: Journalists have always had a love/hate relationship with FishbowlDC: Reporters love its inside-baseball, occasionally catty, sometimes serious look at the reporting world in D.C. But they hate it when they're the ones getting covered unless it's glowing. "Fishbowl is not supposed to be writing about [fill in the blank]" is a frequent defense when a reporter is asked for a response to something involving them. But it's not that they don't understand -- they do -- it's just that they're uncomfortable that our beat is them. Business reporters cover Wall Street. Military reporters cover Iraq and Afghanistan. FishbowlDC covers journalists.

So, Weigel is a journalist and it's my job to cover him and hundreds of others in Washington. It's understandable that Friends of Weigel (FOW's) are defensive on the topic of his departure from WaPo. While the motives of the Journolist leaker are fair game for critique, my decision to publish them is me doing my beat dutifully. It's business, not personal. That said...

2.) We shouldn't have published the emails.

Yes, we should have (see above, it's my job and my beat). Anyone who
thinks otherwise may not understand this: It's not a reporter's job to worry about the outcome of a genuine news story in that it may upset some people.

What's noteworthy here is that the anger to publishing the e-mails is a selective anger. For instance: We're not the only ones who have published private emails from Journolist. So, too, have respected journalists such as Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Yahoo! News's Michael Calderone, who wrote about Journolist while at Politico. In fact, they did it long before FishbowlDC did. Find out how TIME's Joe Klein felt about having his listserv emails disclosed by Greenwald in 2009. Read Greenwald's post. But what's alarming here is they haven't come under the same squall of ethical scrutiny as FishbowlDC has because, well, they're all in the same protective bubble of friends (talk about a real life Fishbowl...). So, when HuffPost's Linkins -- displaying an apparent deep-thinking maturity -- says of me and my co-editor Matt Dornic that we're "Fishbowl F-cks" for our work and that "this is how scumbags launder their karma," one has to wonder: Did he write about Greenwald and Calderone with a similar scathing bitterness? Of course not - they're friends. He wrote that those not on #TeamWeigel are "sellouts, scumbags and bitchasses." With such selective outrage, spare me lectures on journalistic integrity.

3.) I cost Weigel his job.

No, I didn't. I didn't write those messages to some 400 people on Journolist. I wasn't in management meetings at WaPo when what to do with Weigel was discussed. My take on Weigel's behavior as a journalist covering media: I don't believe a reporter can hate those he or she covers and do it carefully or fairly. There are some who blame WaPo for Weigel's behavior, but in the end, it's Weigel who is responsible. But I'm not in charge of him. I wasn't in charge of him. The aftermath? Out of my hands.

4.) FishbowlDC focused on this story for the traffic.

The reality is most websites worry about traffic. Like how you worry about earning a paycheck to pay bills. Or how you eat enough to sustain energy. Or that you breath enough so that you might not pass out. These are basics. But Wonkette claimed we are "trying to get some traffic for the long-ignored mediabistro blog by posting some banal crap from that 'JournoList' email group." Salon's Alex Pareene thinks the aim was to score a Drudge link. Traffic did, in fact, come our way because it was a genuine story. Traffic did, in fact, go Weigel's way for it, too. Some may not have liked that someone leaked Weigel's e-mails. Others may not have liked that WaPo parted ways with Weigel. But the notion that a reporter's biases on his own beat are not grounds for a legitimate discussion here on FishbowlDC or anywhere else is short-sighted at best.

> Update: Apparently I'm not alone in my views. Read WaPo's Ombudsman report by Andrew Alexander on the Weigel matter here. In addition, read Greenwald's explanation of why he printed Klein's e-mails back in 2009 here.

Secondly, a correction: HuffPost's Delaney didn't say I should DIAF (die in a fire). That was another gem from his colleague, Linkins. What Delaney did say was this: "FishbowlDC takes a break from sucking up to DC media types to cost a guy his job." He also called our posts "jackass sanctimony." A little over an hour later, he apparently felt badly and said over Twitter, "I should say FishbowldDC didn't cost @daveweigel his job, since they're reporting what they're getting from whoever's got it in for him."

[TigerPrwn]

I never read frum, but he had something on this today and I actually found value in it. He said there were 'shadow editors' there and it was a disservice to the public because it created groupthink amongst those presenting themselves as independent thinkers. THAT I think is a crime. Snark in private emails should be ignored, generally, imho.

He'll be worse than Weigel in a sense, better in another. It depends on whether you prefer passive aggressive attacks- :D or full frontals. I don't think its going to matter anymore reallly, anyone that WaPo hires will be looked at with extreme skepticsim, and I don't think he will draw the controversy/interest that Weigel did. We've all heard the neocon talking points before. I'm more wary of Weigel's brand of "libertarianism"


A lot of crazy things are happening inside the conservative world today. These are not marginal or unimportant things either. Ron Paul won the CPAC straw ballot. Glenn Beck was CPAC’s keynote speaker. This is a movement in moral and intellectual crisis. Yet it’s very difficult and even dangerous for a committed conservative to acknowledge that crisis or to write about the crisis without excuse or apologetics. Weigel did just that, and very successfully. He is no Max Blumenthal, a self-identified ideological counter-warrior bent on harassing and humiliating those who disagree with him. He is a sympathetic and skeptical outsider, as the best reporters almost always are.

[specsaregood]

Did any of the rightwing talking heads cover this on their radio shows friday?

[TigerPrwn]

More news about Journolist is seeping out- slowly but surely. I am really interested in who is being targeted and why. Breitbart tweeted yesterday that he has rescinded his reward offer for the archives and that more news would be forthcoming.

Does Andrew Breitbart have the Journolist E-mails? (http://www.nationalreview.com/media-blog/231191/does-andrew-breitbart-have-journolist-e-mails/greg-pollowitz)

Breitbart tweets:

Whereby I formally rescind my $100k Journolist reward & wish Spencer Ackerman the very best in whatever profession he now chooses to enter.

Now I am not sure why Breitbart is saying this, because It seems that Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller has the beef.

Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright (http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/)


The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. 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. 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.”

I don't get this. Does Breitbart have the archives or does Carlson? Are they working together? What is up with Ackerman? Certainly his comment about calling people "racists" is telling, but why Ackerman? Where are the rest? God knows there have to be more emails that deal with more important topics like undeclared war, iran, guantanamo, iraq,torture,the bailouts, healthcare, etc etc etc. Will the entire archives be released? How long have they had them?


The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. 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. 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.”
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/

I am extremely weary of establishment hacks (Breitbart) going after other establishment hacks. If we are to "rely" on someone to release certain emails, what is being kept from us and why?

[low preference guy]

[T]ake one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
..

[specsaregood]

I don't get this. Does Breitbart have the archives or does Carlson? Are they working together? What is up with Ackerman? Certainly his comment about calling people "racists" is telling, but why Ackerman? Where are the rest? God knows there have to be more emails that deal with more important topics like undeclared war, iran, guantanamo, iraq,torture,the bailouts, healthcare, etc etc etc. Will the entire archives be released? How long have they had them?


You gotta keep people coming back for more, not just put it all out there at once. This way you keep driving the news cycle. The racist stuff is timely because of the NAACP's recent comments, probably why it was picked first.

[specsaregood]

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.


Man I hope they got all the emails, I just hope they also share any Ron Paul related comments.

[low preference guy]

Man I hope they got all the emails, I just hope they also share any Ron Paul related comments.

I wouldn't be surprised if they made comments against Ron Paul that are more nasty than the neocons'.

Also, these e-mails couldn't have fallen in better hands. Tucker is, by far, the MSM outlet owner most friendly to us.

[specsaregood]

I wouldn't be surprised if they made comments against Ron Paul that are more nasty than the neocons'.

I wouldn't be surprised if they made even nastier comments about all of us (his supporters) :)



Also, these e-mails couldn't have fallen in better hands. Tucker is, by far, the MSM outlet owner most friendly to us.

Agreed, plus he likes to cause a ruckus.

[TigerPrwn]

yes, I do believe they have more, not sure if they have the entire archive. Breitbart hinted at it though- as he rescinded his award offer. what isn't adding up is that Tucker has the archives (or Patel, ex. policy advisor for DICK CHENEY) and is releasing tid bits, and Brietbart is on the up and up as he is the one reporting on the DC story first. I am not sure what is going on there, you'd think that the DC would link through someone like Drudge if they wanted to take all of the credit.

I am sure there is info. about Ron Paul in there, no doubt, but it might not be in their best interests to release it. What is certain is that there are others on "the left" who have the archives, and it will be them who should be watched by their reactions to what/when it is released. So far, I haven't heard much from those who are part of the journo, save Calderone stating "nothing to see here move along"-
http://twitter.com/mlcalderone

RT @Poynter "Top Secret America" co-author Bill Arkin addresses charge that others did the story years ago. http://journ.us/9jGLBw

Calderone's tweet is a total joke, according to him all of this was "already reported". lmao.

here are some good resources for what's being reported in the blogosphere about Journolist:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/some-reaction-to-todays-big-story-about-journolist-and-rev-wright/

http://www.memeorandum.com/

[TigerPrwn]

BOTH are anti-war.

Ackerman is a blue dog.

Hayes has written positively about Ron Paul:


Subbing for Rachel Maddow Tuesday night, Chris Hayes on the passage of Audit the Fed:

CHRIS HAYES: Something truly remarkable happened in Washington today. The United States Senate passed something, by the way of a 96 to 0 vote — 96 in favor, 0 against. Which means Democrats and Republicans voted together, for the same thing.

And this incredible unanimous vote was not for one of those things that always passes, no matter what. Things like renaming a post office, or declaring Grandmothers’ Appreciation Day, or a bill with the word “Patriot” in the title – although that last one did get one dissenting vote, props to Russ Feingold.

No, the Senate voted today to audit the Federal Reserve. So what exactly is an audit of the Federal Reserve, and how did it become the impetus for perhaps the single greatest act of bipartisanship since President Obama took office?

Well, let’s start with the Federal Reserve itself. The Fed is the nation’s bank. Its job is to lend money to other banks. That’s what it does, and that’s what it’s always done.

But beginning in 2007 you might recall that the economy went into an apocalyptic death spiral, and the system went haywire. And suddenly the Fed wasn’t just loaning money to commercial banks, it was loaning money to all sorts of parties it had never before lent money to, and doing it in all kinds of ways it had never done before.

Most troubling of all, the Fed wouldn’t say who those borrowers were, and how much they got. And if the idea of the Fed just handing out cash and refusing to tell anyone who they were handing it to sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy.
http://www.chrishayes.org/articles/ron-pauls-roots/

I agree w/ specs in that this particular tid bit has been released at this time b/c of the NAACP vs. Tea Party crap, but these reporters in particular, Ackerman and Hayes, and even Weigel as a Liberal hack calling himself a "libertarian" and writing for Reason, are not really the part of the left I am most disgusted by.

Another interesting tidbit, Chris Hayes wrote this article on Ron Paul describing the rift between the Rothbardians and the Beltway Libertarians:

http://www.chrishayes.org/articles/ron-pauls-roots/

[low preference guy]

Ackerman was pro Iraq war until 2004.

[TigerPrwn]

Ackerman was pro Iraq war until 2004.

Yes, he also thought of himself as a "Republican" and then went left. I know a lot of people who did that. Thought they were "Republican" until Bush got in there and re-branded the name, then they ran left out of horror, thinking if Bush was a "republican" then they must be a "democrat".

[TigerPrwn]

Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News
By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller | Published: 12:01 AM 07/21/2010 | Updated: 12:22 AM 07/21/2010

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/21/liberal-journalists-suggest-government-shut-down-fox-news/
"JS" is kicking ass and taking names. I can't handle NPR, so I have no hate for this.

however, reading further, we have this:

“I’m not saying these guys are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.”

strawman alert. They are "both" right, but verry verrrry wrong.


TRAAPPP!!!!

[specsaregood]

LOL, gotta love this:



Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

So professor, we are promoting censorship now are we?

[Elwar]

I can almost guarantee that there is a list used by conservative talk show hosts.

I used to drive a 3 hour commute (6 hours of talk radio every day) and it was like clockwork. The early morning show would have one topic, it would be brought up in the next show, Limbaugh would bring it up, Hannity would bring it up, all through the day.

I can see headline news getting play by all of the talking heads, but when it's a fairly obscure thing and they all bring it up...there's some collaboration going on.

I'd say there's probably something with Heritage as the source of most of their talking points.

[specsaregood]

I can almost guarantee that there is a list used by conservative talk show hosts.


You are probably right and I hope it gets disclosed as well. Discrediting both "sides" of the media would be a great step towards bringing liberty back to the US.

[specsaregood]

Unforunately it looks like Tucker is taking a break from disclosing them, but they released another piece from journolist today.

Letter from Tucker:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/letter-from-editor-in-chief-tucker-carlson-on-the-daily-callers-journolist-coverage/


When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/when-mccain-picked-palin-liberal-journalists-coordinated-the-best-line-of-attack/


Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? –write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,” he wrote

[specsaregood]

Oh, I guess the Journolisters didn't like Olbermann either.
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/23/journolisters-offended-by-keith-olbermanns-%e2%80%98misogynistic%e2%80%99-%e2%80%98predictable%e2%80%99-and-%e2%80%98pompous%e2%80%99-show/

And did you guy's know that tucker acquired the domain:?
http://www.keitholbermann.com/