I actually wrote this post several days--maybe more than a week--ago, and forgot all about it.
Before I give you the snips, let me just say that this whole "Journolist" thing is one of those things that amuse me so much about certain liberal bloggers. They note every inconsistency amongst Republicans, exaggerate or twist news stories about them, practically jump up and down screaming when a Republican is caught in anything with the slightest whiff of ethical impropriety, but when it comes to stuff like "Journolist," it just doesn't exist.
Great googly-moogly, it comes to light that left-wing journalists--some of them highly placed, others not so much--and academics really will distort and twist the news to favor their political agenda, so much so that one is entirely right in questioning whether the "news" those lib bloggers are constantly throwing up on their sites is worth a plugged nickel, and what's their response?
Nothing. Dead silence. I'm not entirely sure that they even know the story has broken. It may not have been covered on their favored sites. And I flatly guarantee you that if I brought the subject up to them, the response would be some variant of "it's overblown," "wildly exaggerated," "scare-mongering," or "Fox News is biased, too!" They simply do not seem to be able to process the plain fact that not all Democrats are ethically unstained. Oh, they'll grant it in theory. But in practice? They just don't seem to notice. Funny as all get-out.
At any rate, here's the quotes.
Just in case you've been living in a cave, or if you only get your news from MSNBC, here's the story. A young blogger, Ezra Klein, formerly of the avowedly left-wing American Prospect and now with the avowedly mainstream Washington Post, founded the e-mail listserv "Journolist" for like-minded liberals to hash out and develop ideas. Some 400 people joined the by-invitation-only group. Most, it seems, were in the media, but many hailed from academia, think tanks and the world of forthright liberal activism generally. They spoke freely about their political and personal biases, including their hatred of Fox and Rush Limbaugh, and their utter loyalty to the progressive cause and Democratic success.
[snip]
Journolist e-mails obtained by The Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don't like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They tend to ascribe evil motives to their political opponents -- sometimes even when they know it's unfair. One obscure blogger insisted that liberals should arbitrarily demonize a conservative journalist as a racist to scare conservatives away from covering stories that might hurt Obama.
[snip]
In 2008, participants shared talking points about how to shape coverage to help Obama. They tried to paint any negative coverage of Obama's racist and hateful pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as out of bounds. Journalists at such "objective" news organizations as Newsweek, Bloomberg, Time and The Economist joined conversations with open partisans about the best way to criticize Sarah Palin.
Like an Amish community raising a barn, members of the progressive community got together to hammer out talking points. Amidst a discussion of Palin, Chris Hayes, a writer for the Nation, wrote: "Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get." Time's Joe Klein admitted to his fellow Journolisters that he'd collected the listserv's bric-a-brac and fashioned it into a brickbat aimed at Palin.
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