Outed!

J’accuse!

That reporters from what are purportedly the mainstream, “neutral” press get together with opinion journalists to plot what coverage will advance their joint agenda was news to me. Not particularly exciting or meaningful news, since I don’t read Time or other publications of that nature, but surely at least as interesting as, say, emails from rating agency personnel. (They too charge money for what purports to be neutral, just-the-facts analyses.)

That bloggers like Kevin Drum who purport to be giving an individual view actually co-ordinate their coverage with hundreds of others, to decide on and promulgate was news to me, and has certainly destroyed my interest in what he has to say.

The maunderings of left wing profs at second-tier universities are, I agree, not news.

Don’t most news outlets exist to affirm the prejudices of their readers? I mean, have you seen those New York Times ads on cable? They’re filled with people I just want to punch, if I didn’t see them in the mirror every morning.

You’d think the converted wouldn’t like so much preaching, but it turns out it’s only thing they do like.

The content of the messages is largely irrelevant in terms of how this whole episode plays out. Most of them seem relatively innocuous, and it seems pretty unlikely that any truly over the top statements which can ruin someone’s professional reputation are going to surface.

The reason DC/Breitbart have seized on it this, and the real reason the story has gotten so much attention is because it is somewhat of a confirmation of what lots of people (namely, the crowd DC are playing to) have suspected for some time but not been able to back with discrete evidence: that lots of people on the listserv covered the election from the perspective of “How can I minimize the potential damage to Obama’s image/chances” rather than “What are the substantive facts about this story that people need to know to form their opinion.” Note, I am not trying to make a statement about whether this is true or not, just saying how it is interpreted by many people.

One of the implications is that no blatantly offensive messages have to appear in order for the integrity of those involved to be damaged, as this is about the mindset of the people involved, not specific statements they have made. The story will be as damaging to their integrity as any given individual wants it to be, since people are largely going to interpret this in a way consistent with their preconceived notion about whether the media is/isn’t biased.

That reporters from what are purportedly the mainstream, “neutral” press get together with opinion journalists to plot what coverage will advance their joint agenda was news to me.

The other implication is, what does it say about how the reporters involved would react to coming across a potentially crippling fact or story about the candidate they want to win, and if had the hypothetical choice of reporting what they knew to be true vs making sure it never was revealed, what would they do? If it is revealed that a reporter regularly insults with similarly inclined colleagues about how their work can increase or decrease a certain candidate’s election prospects, it gives skeptics lots of room to run with their skepticism. Like I said, people are going to read into this what they want to read into it.

I think that what Klein and the list’s other outspoken defenders would really like to say is, “This is unfair for us to be put in the spotlight like this, the people hyping this are hypocrites since they are doing the exact same thing as what we are being accused of, and try to influence popular opinion and the news cycle in the same way. Andrew Breitbart? Daily Caller? They are the ones trying to impugn our credibility and act as the stewards of good practice here?” But they can’t really say that directly, instead they are going to point out that nothing “that bad” was said, and portray it as a place where people could go to “bounce ideas” off each other, etc.

PHB,
Of course, that’s the secret code! You don’t think the liberal media allow actual conservatives to publish, do you? Those are liberal infiltrators who know you know they know you know: whenever they say “The NAACP is racist,” you know they know you know they are really saying “We are racist”!!!! That is how they protect us against themselves!

Or maybe they are confessing that they are bad right-wingers who deserve public calumny, in other words they themselves must they are sorry to say confess to being themselves “left.” It’s tough to decide.

It works less well as I go down your list, though. Do they believe they know you know they know they themselves are actually climate scientists?

That reporters from what are purportedly the mainstream, “neutral” press get together with opinion journalists to plot what coverage will advance their joint agenda was news to me

The role of the press is not to be neutral, y81. Especially in the US today, telling the truth in public is not a neutral act. It is deeply unfortunate for your country that so many journalists think that their role is to pick a spot exactly halfway between the two opposing sides and sit there. This isn’t honesty and impartiality, it’s cowardice.

You should sue Fatbeard the Trivial. Not that this, in itself, is important – it’s the principle of his bullying and snooping.

Henry’s explanation is as good as any, but I continue to be nonplussed. It turns out that liberal journalists talk to one another. They also discuss current issues and use bad words about their political opposites.

Why would anyone imagine that conservative journalists behave any differently?

This is just one of a number of episodes in the past two years that have convinced me that a) the GOP and its operatives are not responsible ‘small-d’ Democrats, and are in fact a rather deranged bunch, b) what the USA laughably calls journalism is so facile, skin-deep and generally ignorant that 99% of it is utterly worthless c) when you combine a+b, the consequences for the actual governance of the state are rather catastrophic.

So, have spent the last 5 years furtively dreaming of the day I would one day complete my DPhil and escape to the ‘new world’ I am now pretty much over my Americo-philia, and content to remain here in the godless badlands of the EU. It may not be perfect, but its a helluva lot better than the alternatives.

One detects just a wee bit of mean-spiritedness among the Journolisters too, it seems to me.

Really? Where?

The Right’s shadowy policy-klatch consists of evil billionaires and the Chamber of Commerce, and the nominal Left has a bunch of bloggers, some of them in their first full-time fucking jobs?

Best publicity Ezra Klein’s ever going to get, ever. It’s just so…smallish.

The most newsworthy breaking story on this thread is surely that Fred Barnes has written an “interesting piece”

You only suffer in it.

Truer words. Not much else seems to happen in the Breitbartian paradise.

Henry, I felt the same way on election night.

“If you have reason to believe something reported by Kevin Drum is untrue, that’s fine. But don’t go looking for reasons to write off what he says so you no longer have to think critically about it.”

But that’s not realistic. There are thousands of bloggers; I couldn’t possibly read them all. One filter that I customarily apply is that I don’t read blogs written by people without graduate degrees. (Kevin Drum has been a bit of an exception.) Another filter is to find independent voices, so that I encounter a diversity of views. If I find that Kevin Drum is in fact channeling a party line, that is sufficient reason to add him to the thousands of unread blogs. If you want to say that I am failing to think critically about all those thousands of blogs, go ahead.

Some other filters: (i) I don’t read blogs that are excessively intemperate or angry or where the author seems like a crank (e.g., Arnold Kling, Clayton Cramer); and (ii) I don’t read blogs that don’t allow comments (except Instapundit, because I think he has a valid reason, given the size of his readership) or censor comments.

y81, it’s not that anybody is really concerned about which blogs you read. But your claims don’t make sense. If you realize that blogger X is writing pretty much the same as blogger Y, you would be reasonable to conclude that one of them is redundant. But if you have been reading blogger X, found his posts interesting and worthwhile reading, but stop reading them because somebody told you that X is just “channeling a party line”, that doesn’t make sense. The reasonable position would be to that blog X should be read or not based on its own merits, not based on how it is related to other blogs.

Henry, a link would be nice. There are now several front page stories on Daily Caller discussing Journolist. I found your quote through a site-specific Google search for your name.

No, there is nothing damning about that discussion, save for reminding us how sentimental people were about Obama. But I do think there’s a there there in a sense.

Why is it that all the major media almost completely agree from day to day on what the important stories of the day are? Yesterday, the top story in the US was Sharrod, not the fact that the oil well may need to be uncapped. I imagine other potentially newsworthy things happened that were not covered at all. Now, the media are probably tired of talking about the oil well, so I understand the decision. But independent media sources seem to reach very similar decisions day after day on what the discussion for that day should be about and which takes on it are legitimate and which are fringe or otherwise unworthy of mention, which is not something about which universal agreement would be expected, given the general differences in values, priorities, and attitudes that exist in the human race. After all, I and my personal friends do not always agree on what the media should be talking about and we probably have more in common than random members of the public. So seeing that these people are talking off-set and formulating their ideas and attitudes in group discussion reinforces the notion that we are dealing with group think here. It is what I suspected all along: that the mainstream media discuss their coverage among themselves and reach a lot of broad consensus outside of public purview. It is not scheming and it is probably not mostly conscious, but it is not nothing, and it does have visible results.

Well, in that case, I suspect people at the editorial level are also having their discussions. In previous eras, these probably took place in bars, Today, maybe still, but I wouldn’t be surprised at email lists, though more exclusive than this one. If the culture of journalism breeds this uniformity of thought without communication, I think that would be even more damning, but that’s not what I believe. If it is natural for journalists to chat, it is also so for editors.

I really haven’t had much cause to get excited about this whole tempest in a teacup. I don’t think most Beltway journalists are any more useful to my politics than your average insurance salesman or small-town school board member. But I have been a journalist in the past, and I do know quite a few people currently employed by the mainstream media, and from that perspective, I really have to question the perspicacity of anyone who thinks this scandal is anything but small beer.

Journalists don’t spring forth from J-school with some perfectly “objective” guidelines for reporting hardwired into their brains. Even the ones who pride themselves most on their “objectivity” (i.e. those who are the most devout adherents to the Ideology of American Journalism), have to get story ideas, and glosses, and background and edits from somewhere. The Journalist does not sit in his or her ivory tower, shining a powerful spotlight on the groundlings until some piece of “news” is illuminated. Journalists make the news. And they do that based on the influence of many other people. Some of those influences are well-defined and public — the named source in a story, the editor on the masthead — and some are less obvious — the background source who speaks only without attribution, the junior copy editors who have the first crack at messing up cleaning up the reporter’s prose. There’s also everyone at the news meeting, the journalist’s friends and family, the publisher, the publicist who wrote the press release, the salespeople, the reporters from other news organizations on that beat. So this idea that a journalist’s reportage can be (or even should be) sacrosanct and inviolate is fairly absurd on the face of it. Once you get beyond the baseball scores and yesterday’s high temperature, everything else in the news is a matter of interpretation.

It’s also ridiculous to talk about a “party line”, as though we lived in a dictatorship rather than an oligarchy. There doesn’t need to be a “party line” — the ideology we swim in is far, far too strong to need to resort to that kind of ham-fisted thought policing. Go to any town with two competing newspapers (if you can still find one) — several times a week their front pages will be virtually identical. Is that because there exists some objective standard by which we can say that the most important story that day was a bonding bill being voted down, the second most important story was a big house fire that killed three students and the third most important story was the arrest of a serial rapist? Of course not. It’s simply that journalists spend a huge amount of their time and energy making sure that they all agree on a consistent interpretation of the world, and they police themselves to make sure that they all adhere to it.

“But if you have been reading blogger X, found his posts interesting and worthwhile reading, but stop reading them because somebody told you that X is just “channeling a party line”, that doesn’t make sense.”

Interesting theory, but I am too much of an American for that: the cult of authenticity has me in its grip. If you aren’t presenting your own honest opinions, then I don’t want to hear what you have to say. If your book is ghostwritten, I don’t want to read it. If you copied your sermons off the internet, I’m not coming to your church. Etc. Life is too short to listen to anyone inauthentic.

Previous comment written hastily, and I should have read it before posting. I think the meaning comes across though.

Man, what is with everybody putting scare quotes around “objectivity”? It’s like there’s a bunch of motherfucking relativists running around in here.

Once you get beyond the baseball scores and yesterday’s high temperature, everything else in the news is a matter of interpretation.

Now that’s just lazy. The fact that some facts are hard to describe in terms everyone can agree on doesn’t mean it’s all interpretation. Does Obamacare mandate death panels? Is waterboarding torture? Is Obama a Muslim? Does he have a birth certificate? “Well, that depends what you mean by…” Please. Nobody thinks journalists are infallible conduits of truth, but pretending not to see bullshit for what it is isn’t “interpretation;” it’s just more bullshit.

49: Now that’s just lazy.

I should have thought it was obvious that I was intentionally engaging in some hyperbole there, but apparently I was mistaken.

46: I don’t think, though, that this is a state of affairs that should be blithely accepted.

Nor do I, and again, apparently my intention was not clear. When I was working regularly as a journalist, and even today when I email or speak to my journalist friends, I try and tried to do whatever I could to disabuse them of the notion that they could function without some ideological bias, and also the notion that there was some positive standard of objectivity to aspire to. And I think I got through to a few of them. But they’re realists. And they have careers to manage. And my voice crying in the wilderness isn’t nearly as loud as that of the editor they see every day, nor the couple of grand that appears in their bank account every two weeks. When I was an editor, I had some tiny amount of power to struggle against that tide, but again there were Editors-in-Chief and publishers and those sorts of people who curtailed what I was able to accomplish.

y81 writes “I don’t read blogs written by people without graduate degrees. ”

I’m sure that wasn’t intended to be funny, but good grief. Read what you write. Listen to what you say. Then ask yourself, “how’s that going to come off to people who read it?”

I used to pick up a Weekly World News whenever Bat Boy was on the cover, so I can’t knock Daily Caller and Breitbart readers for having the same instincts.

y81 writes “I don’t read blogs written by people without graduate degrees. ” […] Listen to what you say. Then ask yourself, “how’s that going to come off to people who read it?”

And when you consider y81’s frequently expressed loathing of academia and academics, it’s even weirder.

What is left unexplained, and to me remains inexplicable, is how Ezra could have ever expected something different from Tucker Carlson? I can think of nothing that he has added to thought, content or tone in political discussion for as long as he has enjoyed some form of notoriety. What Ezra expected him to contribute is a mystery. His Daily Caller appears to be a holding action after somehow missing out on the grander streams of right wing welfare for conscience-free hacks. He should be very grateful to Ezra for helping him to regain temporary popularity.

If this was some Great Liberal Conspiracy, it’s a pretty ineffective one. For instance, what the hell is Jonathan Chait doing?

However, I must say I’m impressed that you got the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on board.

Daniel:

Really? A Jewish Conspiracy? Are you sure you want to go down that route?

Further evidence of a conspiracy!!!1!

I don’t understand the concern here. Aren’t Carlson et al reporters? Don’t reporters have opinions? Especially about, you know, “the dynamics of opinion-formation — opinions about how prominent crazy people and spin doctors in the public sphere affect public discourse“? And isn’t it “silly”, therefore, to think that they don’t have “a positive duty to act on those opinions … the better to help their readers” — that’s y’all — “form sensible opinions”? And now that you’ve been helped, shouldn’t you be, well, maybe appreciative at least? Where’s John Holbo? … John? … Anyone?