Posted on 07/22/2010 3:28:53 AM PDT by iowamark
In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.
But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.
The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”
Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”
“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”
Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”
Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.
“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.
Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”
Blogger Matt Yglesias sent out a new post thread with the subject, “The line on Palin.”
“John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern,” Yglesias wrote.
Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. “The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her,” Kilgore said.
Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had “openly backed” parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he was offering “typical offhand political analysis” and that Journolist was one of many online places he scoured for news to post to his blog.
Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “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,” Hayes wrote.
Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: “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.”
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.
Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: “Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’.”
Kilgore wasn’t sold: “I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ bullshit about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way.”
Zenilman of Politico, a purportedly nonpartisan journalist, weighed in with tactical advice: “The experience attack is a stupid one. It’s absolutely the wrong tack — the tack that McCain took when he was losing, and that Hillary and Biden took all primaries.”
Joe Klein of Time stopped by with an update on the latest from his magazine: “We’re reporting that she actually supported the bridge to nowhere. First flub?”
Klein, who displayed an independent streak in other circumstances (“anybody who knows me knows I do my own thinking,” he said in a Wednesday interview), seemed to exude more partisanship that day than usual.
As the morning wore on into the afternoon, some on Journolist came to believe the Palin pick had been shrewd. Palin was coming off as appealing and a maverick, they worried.
“Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks. Grating voice or not, ‘inexperienced’ or not, Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider’,” Kilgore said, “What we can do is to expose her ideology.”
Ryan Avent, then blogging for the Economist and now an editor there, agreed that criticizing Palin’s experience might not work. “I really don’t think the experience argument needs to be made by the Dems. It’s completely obvious to any reasonable person. Instead, hammer away at the fact that she has terrible positions on things like choice, and on the fact that she has no ideas on the issues important to people,” he wrote.
Journolist’s founder Ezra Klein, now a blogger at the Washington Post, reached an entirely different conclusion: “I see no reason to attack Palin. I think you accurately describe Palin and attack McCain.” Klein linked to an article he had written for the American Prospect that calmly described Palin’s thin resume.
Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.
That was all on the day of the announcement.
Once again, the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy theory is proven true. Isn't the above exactly what happened in every "mainstream" media outlet? You might be able to argue that the so-called impartial media outlets didn't have reporters on Journolist, but you have to admit that they all followed this playbook to the letter.
Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away
It’s beginning to look more like the internet equivalent of guys getting together at the bar, which they’ve always done, I’m sure. The big name here, as far as I’m concerned is Toobin, who’s not only New Yorker but CNN, and with his law degree , ran major interference for Obama on the COLB, when Factcheck “endorsed its authenticity.” I’d like to see how journolist coordinated that one, like the on-going failure to acknowledge the redacted certificate # and the obvious fact that the COLB is not a birth certificate. HOW do they keep the network newsanchors from even asking those questions?
Apart from being positively tyrannical, this seems so . . . childish. And sad.
“I may disagree with what you have to say, bt I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” is a dead leter.
Many on the left are not interested in having a constitutional republic. They want a “brave new world” in which the elites control. Didn’t Thomas Friedman lament that we don’t have China’s system?
And yet, do we only know 75 of the 400 members? I wonder how many were big network producers, on the list and taking ideas but not thought leaders offering them.
Turns out it was a listserv and the journalists were creating the Democrat Talking Points on their own.
Indisputable evidence that that the Vast Left Wing Media Conspiracy is hard at work to manipulate our future.
The Free Press are abject traitors to this country and prostitutes to their craft.
Please, when posting articles from the JournoList organizations, include the trademark tag after their name: Ex. By Joe Klein, JournoList™
That's coming ~ many of these pukes should be prepared for self-immolation 'cause that's the ONLY THING that will save them from total personal destruction.
So far, though, we have 65 people talking around that approach ~ they're finding weaknesses in everything but not that one ~ it's in there and all we need to do is find it.
The attacks began a journo-second after the rumor surfaced that he had selected her. I remember hearing this as we were waiting for the announcement:
Rumor has it that John McCain has selected Governor Sarah Palin, mayor of a small Alaskan town, to be his running mate.
The leftist are AND HAVE BEEN playing major league baseball... steele and the rnc are playing T-ball and are STILL flinching when they swing.
LLS
I think a more apt analogy is that the Republitards have been playing Candyland while the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party have been playing Three Dimensional Chess.
Wow, this just keeps getting better. It is a really sad testimony about the state of journalism these days.
A far cry from the golden era when most reporters were working class and worked their way up from the police beat. Now they are just scum.
just damn them. I hope an article a day comes out about the systematic, trumped-up teardown of this woman and is BLASTED across the internet and tv screens. SHINE THAT LIGHT, drive those cockroaches out where they can be stepped on. They ARE the story now.
Trust is earned... you have lost ALL that we had in you... you may never re-earn it... I do not think that you care.
LLS
My mom, now in a nursing home, was a newspaper reporter. Back in the days when reporters weren’t necessarily graduates of journalism school. Many of them started, like my mom did, as concerned citizens who noted that there were some fishy things going on. It began by feeding information and questions to the grizzled guy (picture a Lou Grant type) on the newsdesk. Eventually, the newsdesk guy would add these kinds of folks to his staff as correspondents, who did the “grunt work” on the ground, the fact gathering and verifying. That is how my mom’s career began.
The big myth today is this “new media.” Everything old is new again, however. The only thing that makes this media “new” is the fact that the internet exists and can bypass disinterested established media sources via blogs, etc. That is the only thing that is different. So many of the new media types we know started out the same way my mom did; as concerned citizens. In the days of our Founding, they would have been handing out self-published leaflets on the town square.
If my mom had full control of her faculties right now, she would be enraged at what is going on in what passes for journalism these days.
In all the years she did her job, at no time, on no day did I ever overhear her on the phone conspiring with another reporter over what their “take” on a story would be. Mind you, 75% of her work was done over the phone, conducting interviews, follow up to public meetings, etc. This was at our home, so we could hear all of it (at least her end).
She would be simply speechless if she heard this stuff.
LLS
The Fourth Estate could care less. Unbiased reporting is not as appealing as political power.
Bump
This proves what I and others have believed for years: The left wing media is a continuation of Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Seventy years ago these so-called “journalists” would’ve been standing on a streetcorner screaming “Seig Heil!”
Well, Biden certainly didn’t help Obama politically. So they had to invent another reason.
When I saw this thread it occured to me that Palin (having standing by being damaged by this group) could sue and expose the whole fam-damily. Demand a list of all members!
So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you LOVE is sick.” John 11:3
We have been brainwashed into believing we need a huge Establishmedia to ration our information when we don’t. There are two ways to make the media unbiased, one would be put a $1000 bounty on liberal journalists, the other would be to close the corporate newsrooms and put them out to pasture replaced by smaller more dynamic news orgs that will give a variety of thought. Right now we have giant corps like GE who use their news programs as nothing more than write offs to filter information. We have no variety of opinion in the large news companies and only tiny little FOX exploring the corruption of our gummit. Now is the time to pull the plug on these money pits and let Capitalism take over. Could there possibly be anything more corrupt than NBDNC?
When you have an internet bringing information to your fingertips in real time do you really need a giant monolith deciding what they will and won’t report. Do we need these corrupt corps or their distorters being activists for the DNC to get their politicians elected? It is time to call them out for the commie propagandists we know they are and make them suffer for their one sided coverage. We don’t need them nearly as bad as they need us and it is time to make them pay. It’s time to save some trees and dolphins for these Eart worshippers and tell them to keep their yellow ink and nightly snooze. A bit ironic they lecture us on protecting the forest while they are using trainloads of trees to print their birdcage liners.
We now have been told the Stone Age Press was colluding to make sure all of obozo’s questions in the campaign were no brainers. If anybody would ax a question about his past mentors, the questioner was going to be labeled a racist by all the other journalists including Media Matter$oro$. This was a coordinated attack on the FOX reporters and even attacked Steponallofus when he questioned Black Oblack on Minister Wright. Reporters completely backed down as we all remember the different rules that Gov Palin was exposed to. Small wonder he looked so brilliant while she was sliced and diced into a terrified monkey. Wonder how many emails were exchanged on what techniques and tactics to use to unnerve her and edit for maximum effect. Was SNL also involved?
This journalistic malfeasance is more proof we need to take this out of a bloated socialist boondoggle and put into a free market. If we had a Capitalistic system there would be an investigation into this MediaGate and find out who and where it went. Was it only journalists or were their heads of corps or people in the campaign and who? These questions need to be answered to see how the election was manipulated from the commie-cult media and where do they go? We know it was coordinated out of the Ohbummer campaign although we still have to know how many journalists participated. We have to take those reporters who felt their job was that of a political hack was more important than any impartiality. Once again the corrupt journalists give a bad name to the other 2%.
How many more of these scandals can the Establishmedia absorb before the entire façade comes goes Humpty Dumpty? When you have people who are obvious hacks delivering the daily dose of propaganda you can’t have too many more of these scandals pounding extra nails into the Press Corpse’ coffin. To imagine the smartest man in the history of the planet needing such a choreographed campaign while trashing Palin worse than Bush. Did the Obozo campaign write the questions for Gibson and Colic? Did they pick out Gibson’s glasses? Did they tell them how they wanted her to be portrayed or did they have to be told since they attend the same strategy sessions? To imagine the levels they needed to reach to get below the Bush campaign standards they not only did it but exceeded anybody’s expectations.
It is time to bring a fairness nondoctrine to the Samestream mediots. We need to have the same number of Conservative outlets as there are liberal. There is only one way to guarantee this and that is to remove all govt regs and subsidies to let the market determine the winners and losers. If we would fire the losers to let the market determine rather than the corrupt networks we have now the spectrum would be covered. If we had a solid representation of numerous Conservative outlets, there would be no limits to the number. This is exactly what they don’t want since the liberal ideas would be left on the waste heap of histoir where they belong.
The Dinosaur Press has become as corrupt and partisan as the gummit. We no longer believe a single report they give and are laughing off their claims. How many times can you report Conservatives are racist poo poo heads. We already know they are an arm of the DNC living off the fat of giant corporations w/no regard for truth or profit. It is too important to explain what Capitalism is and how it can bring freedom and prosperity to not only every person in America but the World. Our Exstream Wing media is standing in the way of that information to continue their evangelization of their Commie Cult. Those giant corps and banks need to cut them free to sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas to force them to report the Truth no matter where it runs or whose toes it taps. Now more than ever it is time to launch a new media who is not a braindead ideologue but a Free market warrior hungry for the Truth. We need to bring the power of Capitalism to the media and bring back a truly Free Press. That said a bounty would be more effective.
Pray for America
And you know what? I’ve done an image search on these perps and nearly every one of them looks young, maybe earfly 40’s for the most part. They may never have heard of Goebbels. They’ve been taught nothing.
Ooh, Fox news (TV) breaking today’s story now!!!!!!
If the second in command was in the least competent, someone would have offed the _resident by now.
Isn’t Toobin now involved in a child support lawsuit from someone other than his wife?
I am beginning to believe that Mike Schmidt from the Romney and then McCain campaign was part of this cabal.
And I would like to see the name of the first person who said that Bristol’s baby was fathered by the Dude.
These people are evil bastards and need to be called out.
As for PoliticO........every knew they were an arm of the dem party right from the start. Mike Allen.........blech.
Anyone doubt that this was all done with the direct help of the comPost.
The Defenders of Wild Life and the World Wildlife Federation were trashing Palin in their publications before she was selected as McCain’s running mate. It seems they had their panties in a bunch over the aerial wolf hunts in Alaska. Liberal aquaintances of mine sent around copies of articles stating how Gov. Palin was killing animals. Never underestimate the power of an envior-whacko.
This list would be 100 times better is they showed the news organizations next to the names.
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany, would approve of today's mainstream media coordination. Time always admired his methods and his power, and now they emulate him.
A thread on Weds had the names sorted and, IIRC, the “news” groups they were affiliated.
Like the AGW leaked emails, this confirms what we knew but they will deny, deny and deny til they die.
When will citizens file a class-action suit? The damages are immense.
Well these idots just gave Sarah ALL the Ammo she will ever need to go after them.
My sister has friend that is a die hard liberal. He made millions with a start up company that he later sold so he could retire at a fairly young age (capitalism is bad, doncha know!)
Any-who, this idiot will only watch PBS and claims that FNC lies! He actually said that if any of the current stories were true (The New Black Panthers, for example), then he would have seen them on PBS.
He is beyond hope. But his type are the morons that put our freedoms in jeopardy by standing by Biggie O!
If what you say is fact... then war is inevitable.
LLS
not that it wasn’t completely freakin’ obvious from the outset, but it’s nice to have this smoking gun
We all suspected it. But to see these collaborative email between supposedly “independent” and “unbiased” propagandists is amazing. It’s amazing they’ve gotten away with it for so long. Bunch of hyprocritical pigs.
Great point...she has shown she's not afraid to call these scum out and this will help.
The media just can’t give it up - trying to bring Sarah down has been one BIG FAILURE! Therefore, she lives in their head 24/7.
GO unconventional SARAH! It’s your time and their time is over!
“like the internet equivalent of guys getting together at the bar, which they’ve always done...”
The big difference is that these aren’t reporters “shooting the breeze” or “venting” these are planning sessions about strategies and tactics as “the unofficial campaign” for Obama.
This is not discussing both candidates and their pros and cons. This is blatant “undisclosed” advocacy. Their reports and articles should have come with the disclaimer...paid for by the Obama campaign.
Journolist = “the unofficial campaign”
Also Klein is a big name. He’s the one who wrote Primary Colors about Bill Clinton.
Mark this day, Jeffie and I agree.
“.....the co-ordinated attack on Sarah started on day one.....
......and continues to this day. Petty, childish rumor-monging that, sadly, many Americans believed.”
It started WAY BEFORE Gov. Palin emerged on the national scene thanks to the wildlife and envior whackos who were trashing her policy on aerial wolf hunts in Alaska and her hunting. The rest of the lame stream media just added to it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.