Posted on 07/20/2010 10:06:00 AM PDT by kcvl
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
JournoList, Round Two [Daniel Foster]
The Daily Caller has a second group of leaked "JournoList" e-mails — these dating to the scandal surrounding Barack Obama's association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 presidential campaign — which illustrate a coordinated effort among a group of left-leaning news and opinion journalists to bury the story and/or make it about right-wing racism.
First, a couple of caveats: little in the threads the Caller publishes rises to the level of a nefarious "mainstream media conspiracy," as most of the journalists quoted are columnists or work for lefty opinion rags like The Nation and Mother Jones. They have no duty to report the news neutrally, and indeed would not be good at their jobs if they weren't trying to shape the debate about Rev. Wright. So much the better — at least we know where they are coming from. Indeed, much of what is said in the thread — for instance by Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent — was echoed on blogs and other public fora, and the course of action that ultimately emerged from the JournoList's coordination on the Wright story was . . . an open letter to ABC News, the one and only of its kind to have emerged from the list.
This all being said, the thread does reveal the kind of naked flackery that characterized much of the lefty media's coverage of the 2008 presidential race, a paranoid Obamania in which the then-candidate's cheerleaders in the press did their best to bury potentially damaging story-lines, in this case by trying to recast any criticism of Obama as latent right-wing racism. The participants in the thread are perfectly forthright — maddeningly so — that this should be their strategy in shaping the Rev. Wright narrative.
I won't add much else in the way of color commentary, since the money-quotes in the story speak for themselves. Here's Ackerman:
http://www.campusprogress.org/sync/images/3896.jpg
Chris Hayes, of The Nation, also placing blame on the Right and advocating a similar strategy, going so far as to urge the list’s straight-journalist members to ignore the Wright story:
The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”
Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just
how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”
“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.
HotAir.com -
8:45 am on July 20, 2010
by Ed Morrissey
Update: But was the campaign effective? Ed Driscoll put together a video showing the correlation of this effort on Journolist and the declaration by CNN that it would be a “Wright-free zone.” Correlation isn’t causation, but this is a pretty interesting juxtaposition.
How the Wright-Free Zone was Built
July 20, 2010 - by Ed Driscoll
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/07/20/how-the-wright-free-zone-was-built/
Update II: There is something to keep in mind in this particular story, which is that the people involved in the specific conversations regarding the smear are all opinion journalists, and not people filling roles in objective reporting. The Prospect, the (Washington) Independent, and the Nation are all publications with an explicit point of view, although the Independent offers a little more of a pretense of traditional reporting. That doesn’t relieve them of responsibility for proposing and/or considering an odious smear campaign, but it does make it difficult to tie this to other journalists filling a different role.
Of course, those journalists in different roles who participated in Journolist, assuming any did, didn’t exactly leap to expose this smear attempt, either. And we haven’t seen the last of the Daily Caller’s Journolist stories, either.
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