... but, I repeat myself. And I am forced to also reiterate that
our nation's mainstream media (MSM) increasingly mirror Pravda of the former Soviet Union. Ironically, "Pravda" means "truth." I guess "MSM" has come to mean "liberal bias."
We all knew we were having the wool pulled over our eyes during this last election with
the Media refusing to investigate anything negative about Obama. Obama was golden ... untouchable ... the Media Darling ...
the Media Messiah.
Today a few media outlets, mostly
FoxNews and online journalist bloggers, are reporting on
The Daily Caller's breaking story of how certain
leftwing MSM colluded in suppressing the Obama - Rev. Wright controversy. In connection with that, The Christian Science Monitor is positing that
using the label "racist" is a liberal media tactic.
First,
The Daily Caller broke this story today (emphasis added):
It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor,
the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.
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.
Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “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.”
“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”
...
Imagine that! A journalist calling on his colleagues to deflect the negative attention -- actually saying their role was to "kill" any "chance of discourse that actually serves the people." WTF?!? Our media are supposed to inform us! They're supposed to be a part of our nation's checks and balances!!! But, here we have one of them encouraging
COLLUSION -- to do whatever it takes to get their guy elected!!!! Investigative journalism, let alone the truth, be damned!
In conjunction with The Daily Caller's scoop, The Christian Science Monitor asserts that Journolist's "racist" labeling was a 'liberal media tactic.' Here's its take on the situation:
JournoList was an informal online discussion group involving several hundred left-leaning journalists. In excerpts released Tuesday, some of their discussions appeared to veer toward collusion, from how to protect Barack Obama to how to tar conservative critics.
Excerpts published Tuesday by a conservative online news site suggest that a group of journalists from the mainstream media discussed ways to shield Barack Obama from criticism during the 2008 presidential election.
Among the strategies put forward: call conservative critics racists.
The excerpts, published by the Daily Caller, come at
a sensitive time, with both he political left and right accusing each other of race-baiting.
The
NAACP recently accused the “tea party” of sheltering racists in its midst. Shortly after, the National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams, leader of the Tea Party Express, for writing a satirical letter about how “colored people” preferred slavery.
Now, conservative commentators are pointing to the JournoList excerpts as proof that the mainstream media collude to promote a liberal agenda, play the race card, and discredit conservative movements like the tea party.
"The [JournoList] is troubling," says Jim Campbell, a political science professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. "At one level it could be thought of as just colleagues throwing ideas out to one another, but from another standpoint it almost looks like collusion … where virtual talking points are shared and solidified in a group.”
“That can't be healthy for the country – or for the media, for that matter," he says.
Ah, hah! Interesting timing: "racism" being thrown about by both sides of the political spectrum and by all races.
So, what is / was the "Journolist?" The above CSM contiues with this explanation:
The list was created by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein and, and several hundred self-described liberals joined before it was shut down recently.
According to excerpts released, reporters quibbled endlessly among themselves, and it's far from clear if any of their collective kvetching ever drove an actual media narrative. But the excerpts pull back the curtain on how deeply the visceral and vindictive left-right split in American politics not only is reflected within the media, but can be amplified by them.
When conservatives were criticizing Mr. Obama for his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008, some JournoList members discussed a counterstrategy.
So, we had not only politicians engineering Obama's rise to power, but the media elites were in collusion with them!
Interestingly, less than a month ago,
Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, one of the media outlets implicated in the scandal, seemed to be whitewashing Journolist upon its announced closing (emphasis added):
... Let me disabuse everybody by revealing that Journolist was not created for people to work out some party line. The discussion was private not because the conversations were too explosive to be made public, but because they were too mundane. Conversations consisted of requests for references -- does anybody know an expert in such and such -- instantaneous reactions to events, joshing around, conversations about sports, and the like. Why did this have to be private? Because when you're a professional writer, even in the age of Twitter, you try to maintain some basic standard in your published work. I don't subject my readers to my thoughts on the Super Bowl as of halftime, or even (usually) the meaning of the Pennsylvania special election two minutes after polls close. You want the ability to share your thoughts with a group to which you may not have physical proximity.
Why was the group exclusively non-conservative? I wished it did have some right-wingers, but I went back and forth on this and I can understand the reason it didn't.
You wanted to have some discussion of politics that didn't constantly require establishing first principles, so you could muse about a vote to extend unemployment benefits without having to refute the notion that Franklin Roosevelt deepened the Great Depression. It was the same reason that any community of interest exists. There was plenty to argue about. Eric Alterman and I both participated in Journolist -- that didn't keep us from maintaining a rather
hostile public relationship. The same is true of many other members of the list. There was no explicit or implicit understanding that "we're all friends." It was like a bar you frequent, containing some friends, some total strangers, and some guys you get into brawls with.
The notion that the list existed to work out some party line, or to vet ideas before they became articles, is silly. Sometimes people used the list to gather liberal counterarguments to an idea before they wrote it. (You can try it with conservatives, too. I call this "research.") But the notion that Journolist was some kind of Comintern editing ideas before they were published bears no relation to reality, and flies in the face of the interests of those involved. The liberal writers on that list are my competitors. My goal is to publish original ideas before they do ...
I'm sorry to spoil the excitement. It was a chat group.
Chait's comments now are laughable. Interesting timing his column, eh? Maybe someone knew the ball was about to drop on Journolist? Was Chait's post engineered just like Obama's campaign? His miscellaneous
blog posts at the NR are mostly juvenile in tone and very one-sided. Not professional, but they are from his blog and not true reporting ... whatever that might mean nowadays. Perhaps Chait's posts mimic what went on among at the Journolist?
Karl Rove and
Fred Barnes, the ones that Ackerman suggested journalists should label as "racists", responded to The Daily Caller's questions about
their reactions to the revelation:
Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes and former White House senior adviser Karl Rove told The Daily Caller they were disappointed that there was not more criticism from other Journolist members for Ackerman’s plan of attack.
“I’d like to hear an explanation from those who participated in the Journolist about this,” Barnes said. “Why didn’t they quit the thing when smearing other journalists to help Barack Obama was advocated? Why didn’t they denounce the idea in unison?”
Rove played down the notion that members of the mainstream press agreed with Ackerman but he said he found it curious that such talk was tolerated within the group. It was important, he added, not to judge the motives of members who chose not to respond.
“I thought it was a revealing insight in the attitude of one minor player in the D.C. world of journalism,” Rove said of Ackerman’s comments. “It’s an even more important insight into a broader group of more prominent journalists that they seem to be willing to tolerate the suggestion that they should all tell a deliberate lie or that they should take somebody’s head and shove it through a plate glass window. I would hope that somebody would say, ‘Mr. Ackerman, do you really believe we ought to fabricate a lie about people just because we don’t agree with them?’”
Barnes added that even if there was an effort on the left to smear opponents as racists, the plan wouldn’t work.
“The charge has been made so often without any evidence that it has lost its sting,” he said. “It has become the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.”
Washington Independent writer Kevin Drum, who participated in the Journolist discussion, said in an interview Monday that charges of racism should only be used “sparingly.”
Racism -- "It has become the last refuge of liberal scoundrels." Great line!
Well, my friends, your hunches and fears have been confirmed. You may now remove your tinfoil hats, because WE WERE RIGHT about liberal media bias!!!!
Will the story appear anywhere else? I've done a quick glance about the Internet at such places as ABC, MSNBC, The Huffington Post ... nothing ... yet ... but, I'm holding out hope ...
Dr. Alveda King, who is a full-time member of the Pastoral Team of Priests for Life and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., will be leading “Pro-life Freedom Rides” in the coming months, building on a method that the Civil Rights Movement used effectively forty years ago.
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