Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

July 28, 2010

JournoList Erodes Media Prestige

Tucker Carlson’s website, the Daily Caller, has unearthed a treasure trove of liberal journalists talking (nastily) to themselves in a private e-mail list about how they should use their media power to remake the world in their image.

The funniest thing about this expose of JournoList was witnessing journalists say it was unfair to leak these e-mails when reporters had an “expectation of privacy.” More than 90,000 pages of secret documents on Afghanistan have been leaked and journalists are tripping over one another in a mad stampede to cover the story. Everyone should laugh heartily at leak-devouring journalists getting a fistful of their own bitter pills.

The saddest thing about all this is the confirmation (as if it were necessary) that liberal journalists really aren’t journalists first. They’re political strategists. They pretend to be the Hollywood version of Woodward and Bernstein, the brave sleuths digging out government malfeasance and corruption. But in reality, they’re the Woodward and Bernstein who plotted how to get Richard Nixon impeached and ready the way for pacifist and socialist “Watergate babies” like Chris Dodd and Henry Waxman to take seats of power. Ethics are only relevant if they’re a weapon.

Jonathan Strong’s first installment for the Daily Caller proved that with a wallop. Take former New York magazine political writer Michael Tomasky’s plea to “kill ABC” for talking about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “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.”

Liberal journalists in this crowd favor only discourse that “serves the people” – meaning, a “debate” that advances the ball for socialism. Any other uncooperative or unhelpful line of journalism, questioning, discussion, balance or objectivity is “idiocy” that should be “killed.” At its heart, liberal bias isn’t just about slanting the news against conservatives; it’s about slanting the news to discredit and then ignore conservatives until they sit grumpily on the ash heap of history. If that includes censorship, like yanking the journalist credentials of Fox News, some on the JournoList eagerly have encouraged it.

The “mainstream” (ha!) media’s first bucket of water on the Daily Caller’s fire was to claim that the participants on the JournoList weren’t primarily “objective” media types. It was heavily salted with The Nation, Mother Jones, The American Prospect and obscure magazines like Government Executive. But the rebuttal is obvious. The list’s creator, Ezra Klein, rose from The American Prospect to being the 25-year-old blogging boy wonder of the Washington Post, whose opinions pop up all over the paper. It’s not at all uncommon for “mainstream” journalists to be groomed at liberal opinion rags. Think of JournoList as part of a finishing school for “objective” journalists, and you can see where conservatives never trust the national media elite.

The second liberal self-defense of JournoList was that Klein claimed there was no plan for partisan “message coordination.” But the Daily Caller showed how no one on the list was really paying attention to that alleged plan. After Sarah Palin was picked for the GOP ticket in 2008, Suzanne Nossel of Human Rights Watch insisted, “I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.”

Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones insisted the entire left should spread that spin: “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. No message coordination there.

Some of the exposed journalists have defended themselves by saying they never put their vicious messages in the media mainstream. Others suggested they were just as earnestly biased in public as they were in private. Anyone paying attention to the media during the 2008 campaign clearly didn’t need the JournoList ravings to realize the media immediately despised Palin and hailed Barack Obama as the glowing receptacle of liberal hopes, dreams and fairy tales.

But these leaked messages are serious business. What they prove is that the “mainstream” media today are often just a shameless channel for leftist message coordination, and that anyone who assumes he’s simply getting the “news” from the national media is a very callow and uninformed consumer.

What’s most shocking is the silence. How many in the “mainstream” press are publicly denouncing those members of JournoList for their blatant disregard of journalistic ethics? Listen to the crickets.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.