Jonathan Strong is back with more delightful disclosures of progressive groupthink:
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. . . .
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.” . . .
“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.” . . .
(For younger readers, that’s a reference to third-party candidate Ross Perot’s not-ready-for-prime-time running mate in 1992.)
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?” . . .
(Paging Dr. Andrew Sullivan, OB-GYN!)
Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged [in his message to the list] 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.
You can read the whole thing. It has been pointed out that most of the people participating in Journolist were not straight-news reporters. Toobin and Klein are pundits easily recognized as purveyors of liberal arguments. So in a way this is kind of like what might happen if some liberal got hold of Bill Kristol’s e-mail caches from 2002 and tried to portray that as evidence of a Zionist neocon Fox News warmonger conspiracy — “Protocols of the Learned Elders of PNAC.”
Nevertheless, the Daily Caller’s Journolist revelations are valid evidence that the synchronicity of liberal media messaging during the 2008 campaign was not altogether coincidental.
UPDATE: Best Headline of the Day:
Salon Editor-in-Chief Accuses
Conservatives of Distorting Facts, Then
Has to Apologize for Distorting Facts
That shows classic Ace of Spades HQ influence. Not as good as this headline, but still very good. More relevant to Journolist, Ace gets in a couple of shots at Dave Weigel:
When Dave (“Who?”) Weigel wanted to bash conservatives about Palin, he asked why we were freaking out over Joe McGinnis invading her privacy, because “any journalist” would jump at that chance.
See, that’s the problem Dave: No they wouldn’t. How do I know this? Because they haven’t. Bill Clinton’s a big, important figure to write biographies about; how come no one’s renting the apartment across the street from his wink-wink “executive offices” in Harlem and peeking at him to see who visits him?
Same with Hillary. There are a lot of interesting subjects who’d sell a lot of biographies — and for all of them, the lurid promise of exxxtra special access!!! Spy footage!!! would sell even more copies.
So why, Dave, if this is something “all journalists” would jump to do, do they not… actually… do… it?
It’s because you’re wrong. Not “all journalists” would do this about their subjects. Not because they don’t want to sell more books. But because the peer disapproval from their like-minded liberal colleagues discourages them from spying on Hillary Clinton.
And they do it to Palin because none of them care if Palin’s privacy is invaded; in fact, they applaud it. Because she is “The Other.” She is inhuman — and you can treat her worse than an animal.
What Ace is saying — and you should definitely read the whole thing, because I’m hoping for the Ace-o-Lanche here and don’t want to be accused of not throwing the maximum traffic his way — is that there is a partisan double-standard in coverage. That is, in itself, neither new nor shocking. But reporters aren’t forced to confront their own biases because except for The Other (i.e., someone who can be automatically dismissed as a down-the-line Fox News/GOP shill) no one will call bullshit on them.
If all politicians with an “R” beside their names are presumed to be fundamentally illegitimate and unworthy of high office, that premise supports a syllogism with certain conclusions, including:
- Covering the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign with the idea of helping the candidate who seemed most able to defeat the Republican in November.
- Covering the 2008 Republican presidential primary campaign with the idea of helping the candidate who seemed easiest for Democrats to defeat in November.
- Covering the anti-Palin accusations of ax-grinding Alaska gadfly bloggers (Dennis Zaki, Jesse Griffin, et al.) as if they were legitimate news stories, while attempting to shut down coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
- Treating the motives of Tea Party activists with an attitude of hostility and suspicion not applied to, inter alia, SEIU.
Again, I say, such behaviors are logical consequences of the premise that the Republican Party is inherently illegitimate. If you are a young liberal whose formative political experiences were the Lewinsky scandal, the 2000 Florida recount, the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign, etc., then it may be very easy for you to buy into the belief that Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes — the “Right-Wing Noise Machine” — are the only reason Democrats lose elections. And because you don’t ever want those nasty Republicans in charge again, you consider it a matter of humanitarian philanthropy to move heaven and earth to stop Fox News and other conservative voices from influencing the mainstream media narrative.
Thus, the young Journolisters refuse to recognize any basic wrong in their efforts, because to undertake such a reappraisal might lead them to reconsider the validity of their political worldview.
What Ace calls the “Otherization” of conservatives is basic to liberal belief. Remember, I was an ethusiastic partisan Democrat who never questioned that affiliation until I was well into my 30s. Given this personal background, I want to believe that it is possible to change hearts and minds, to persuade Ezra Klein and his smart young friends to re-evaluate their political commitments.
And if they choose instead to remain loyal liberals, then we should emulate Ronald Reagan — another ex-Democrat — in saying that the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they need their heads smashed through a plate-glass window.
Uh, your mileage may vary.
UPDATE II: From the comments, on the “distinction without a difference” between pundits and reporters, which is not fully perceived by many TV viewers:
When Jeffrey Toobin is pontificating on CNN (when he’s not cheating on his wife), my elderly family members view him as another straight news reporter.
Or, at least, as a political analyst, rather than as a partisan hack. And this is an important point about television as a medium. I’ve remarked that the best spokesman the Obama campaign had in 2008 was the Allstate Man. If you don’t get that point, you should read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Meanwhile, Jimmie Bise takes a snapshot of the bleeding mess that is Journolist, and I remind people that “smart” is not a partisan affiliation.
