This story has legs

The Daily Caller exposé about the vast left-wing media conspiracy by a group of 400 members of the Journolist is heating up.

It started with the documentary about an orchestrated attempt by left-wing operatives to "kill the story" about Obama's association with Reverend Wright.


Seen here making incendiary, racist statements from his pulpit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=617eK2XIaLk




Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright


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. At several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect Obama, their favored candidate.

Employees of news organizations including Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Washington Independent, The New York Times, 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.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”


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.”


(In an interview Monday, Tomasky defended his position, calling the ABC debate an example of shoddy journalism.)



Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.

Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed.



The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones (now Politico) rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of Gibson's and Stephanopoulos’s questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.”



Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. The letter should be “Short, punchy and solely focused on vapidity of gotcha,” Bernstein wrote.


In the midst of this collaborative enterprise, Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review, dropped into the conversation to say “be sure to read” a column in that day’s Washington Post that attacked the debate.

Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.

Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”

The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times. But only a week later, Obama – and the journalists who were helping him – were on the defensive once again.



Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.

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.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.



“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us.

Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.



Several members of the list disagreed with Ackerman – but only on strategic grounds.


“Spencer, you’re wrong,” wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. “Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn’t further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_ — Obama’s substantive agenda — with this crap.”

(In an interview Monday, Schmitt declined to say whether he thought Ackerman’s plan was wrong. “That is not a question I’m going to answer,” he said.)



Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”



But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”


http://forum.literotica.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1018368&d=1278957724

Limbaugh responds to JournoList death wish report


By: Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent



This morning I asked Rush Limbaugh what he thought of references to him on the private left-wing journalist discussion group JournoList.

As reported in the Daily Caller, an NPR producer named Sarah Spitz wrote on JournoList that if she witnessed Limbaugh dying of a heart attack, she would “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.”

“I never knew I had this much hate in me,” Spitz wrote, according to the Daily Caller account. “But he deserves it.”


So I asked Limbaugh: What do you make of the fact that people in positions of influence on the Left don’t just want to see you fail, don’t just want to see you marginalized, but would actually like to witness you dying a painful death?


Rush:

“Not having wished anyone dead, nor having fantasized about watching someone die, I cannot possibly relate to this,” Limbaugh responded.

I can only surmise. I think most people on the left live in a world where merit is irrelevant. Theirs is a world in which connections, networking, kissing ass and obedient sameness are rewarded. I am the antithesis of all that. I am a legitimate, achieved and accomplished Number One and I’ve made it on my own and without them and without having followed their proscriptions. I think they are also jealous that I just sold my NY condo for a 125 percent profit while their homes are worthlessly underwater.

Funny thing….a number of my friends sent me the Daily Caller piece and the most shocking thing to them in the story was the advocacy of having government shut down Fox News. That the left wants me dead was not a big deal to them because it was nothing new to them. I think that’s hilarious.

And about that: how about the LAW professor who thinks the FCC can pull Fox’s license? Fox does not have a license. The FCC does not grant Fox its right to exist. And this guy teaches law.

A few minutes later, Limbaugh emailed an additional thought. “And it is not just that they hate how I became who I am,” he wrote. “They literally hate ME. They hate me because I am the most prominent, effective and unrelenting voice of conservatism and they have not been able to stop me.”

No

It doesnt!

No one will cover it

DAILY CALLER will be TRASHED as a RW MOUTHPIECE

No one will care


(PS, MOST OF AMERICA ALREADY KNOWS THIS, THATS WHY THE OLD MEDIA IS TUNED OUT)

The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy


By FRED BARNES responds to the JournoList attack on him


Everyone knew most of the press corps was hoping for Obama in 2008. Newly released emails show that hundreds of them were actively working to promote him.

When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn't be the case.


Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press. True, participants in the online clubhouse appear to hail chiefly from the media's self-identified left wing. But its founder, Ezra Klein, is a prominent writer for the Washington Post. Mr. Klein shut down JournoList last month—a wise decision.

It's thanks to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website that we know something about JournoList, though the emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Mr. Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, the Daily Caller disclosed a series of JournoList musings by David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.

This week, Mr. Carlson produced a series of JournoList emails from April 2008, when Barack Obama's presidential bid was in serious jeopardy. Videos of the antiwhite, anti-American sermons of his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had surfaced, first on ABC and then other networks.




JournoList contributors discussed strategies to aid Mr. Obama by deflecting the controversy. They went public with a letter criticizing an ABC interview of Mr. Obama that dwelled on his association with Mr. Wright. Then, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent proposed attacking Mr. Obama's critics as racists. He wrote:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. . . . This makes them 'sputter' with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

No one on JournoList endorsed the Ackerman plan. But rather than object on ethical grounds, they voiced concern that the strategy would fail or possibly backfire.

Among journalists in general, there's always been a herd instinct. Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator and Democratic presidential candidate, once described political writers as birds on a telephone wire. When one bird flew to the wire across the street, they all did. In Mr. Ackerman's case, I'm glad none of the birds joined him across the street.

We've often seen media groupthink in campaigns. In 1980, most of the media decided that President Jimmy Carter was being mean-spirited in his re-election effort with his harsh denunciations of Ronald Reagan, his Republican opponent. The media turned the meanness issue into major story. In 1992, journalists treated the economy as if it were dead in the water, though a recovery from a mild recession had begun early the previous year. I could go on.

I think JournoList is—or was—fundamentally different, and not simply because one of its members proposed to make palpably false accusations. As best I can tell, those involved in JournoList considered themselves part of a team. And their goal was to make sure the team won. In 2008, this was Mr. Obama's team. More recently, the goal seems to have been to defeat the conservative team.

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

My experience with other conservative journalists is that they are loners. One of the most famous conservative columnists of the past half-century, the late Robert Novak, is a good example. I knew him well for 35 years. He didn't tell me what stories he was working on nor ask what I was planning to write. He never mentioned how we might promote Republicans or aid the conservative cause, nor did I.

What was particularly pathetic about the scheme to smear Mr. Obama's critics was labeling them as racists. The accusation has been made so frequently in recent years, without evidence to back it up, that it has little effect. It's now the last refuge of liberal scoundrels.

The first call I got after the Daily Caller unearthed the emails involving me was from Karl Rove. He said he wanted to talk to his "fellow racist." We laughed about this. But the whole episode was also sad. I didn't sputter at the thought of being called a racist. But it was sad to see what journalism, or at least a segment of it, had come to.

busybody said:

No

It doesnt!

No one will cover it

DAILY CALLER will be TRASHED as a RW MOUTHPIECE

No one will care


(PS, MOST OF AMERICA ALREADY KNOWS THIS, THATS WHY THE OLD MEDIA IS TUNED OUT)

Click to expand...

We'll cover it here. We'll care here, bb. We'll do our small part to reach out to those who haven't heard anything about this by the main stream media.

Otherwise, we become much like communist Russia, being spoonfed approved information through Pravda, and other heavily regulated news sources.



Continuing:


The Daily Caller exposé details how the liberal media plotted to deceive the public during the past presidential election.

Not only did they kill stories that were negative toward Obama, but they deflected blame by purposely making false accusations of racism against the few who did cover the stories.


You have to read the articles to believe how deceptive Obamamedia actually was, even attempting to shut down alternate news media.

Even today, we can recognize similar ploys to eliminate contrary opinions.



Before anyone shrugs it off as a right-wing attempt to attack Obama ... read the ongoing expose on The Daily Caller. It's pretty condemning of the tactics of the liberal media that are still used today.



http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/d...ng-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/


http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/21/liberal-journalists-suggest-government-shut-down-fox-news/

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/21/a-few-excerpts-from-journolist-journalists/

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/w...rnalists-coordinated-the-best-line-of-attack/


http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/d...-news-about-journolist-targeting-sarah-palin/





...

When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack


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 (now Politico). 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.”


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.
((edited to add: HAHAHA!!!))

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 sent the information as a means of promoting a story he had written for Politico.

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.” Zenilman said Wednesday he was offering “typical offhand political analysis.”

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 first day of the announcement.





Watch the video:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/22/d...-news-about-journolist-targeting-sarah-palin/





...

Sarah Palin responds to Journolist attack.


Sarah Palin is blasting the media who immediately and ruthlessly attacked her when Sen. John McCain picked her as his running mate during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Palin described “hordes of Obama’s opposition researchers-slash ‘reporters’” descending upon Alaska in the days after she was picked by McCain.


The Daily Caller revealed posts from Jounolist that show liberal journalists coordinating attack lines against Palin from the moment McCain picked her, suggesting she may have had the deck stacked against her.

Palin said she sensed the vitriol coming from campaign reporters at the time.

“It was too obvious to me, my family, my administration and anyone else who knew me (and my record) that we were in a defenseless position the minute I gave my acceptance speech and the hordes of Obama’s opposition researchers-slash ‘reporters’ had descended upon Alaska,”


Regarding a television interview with Katie Couri, Palin said the interview was selectively edited. “It didn’t help, either, that the hours and hours of interviews with the likes of Katie Couric resulted in a few minutes here and there of selected snippets of my annoyed answers.

Palin says the feeding frenzy culture of the media galvanized her political opponents in Alaska. “The media incentivized political opponents to file false ethics charges and expensive, wasteful, frivolous lawsuits against me, my family and my staff, in an obvious attempt to destroy us,” Palin said.

When those lawsuits — which Palin said she won, but the media didn’t cover — caused legal costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Palin had finally had it, she said.

“I said, ‘Enough. Political adversaries and their political friends in the media will not destroy my State, my administration, nor my family. Enough.’ I knew if I didn’t play their game any longer, they could not win. I would not retreat, I would instead reload, and I would fight for what is right from a different plane.”

What's wrong with this picture???


Journolister who bashed Fox News is on board that determines who gets White House briefing room seat



There is currently a fierce battle among several major news outlets to claim the front-row seat in the White House briefing room recently vacated by long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who retired amid scandal in June.


One of the news outlets battling for the seat is Fox News, which is currently the only TV-network without a front-row seat. It will ultimately be up to the nine-member White House Correspondents’ Association board to decide who gets the highly coveted placement.


This morning, The Daily Caller’s Jonathan Strong reported how some members of the now defunct Journolist list-serv discussed how Fox News needed to be shut down.


One of the participants in the list-serv conversation was Time magazine White House correspondent Michael Scherer, who is also a member of the same White House Correspondents’ Association board that will determine which news outlet will get the vacant front-row seat in the White House briefing room.



In his missives on Journolist about Fox News, Scherer lambasted the cable news network as being an organization interested in promoting a tribal following, not one interested in the search for truth. Fox News President Roger Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization, Scherer wrote. “You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”


According to its website, the White House Correspondents’ Association is expected to be an impartial and inclusive body. “Consistent with the First Amendment, the White House Correspondents’ Association stands for inclusiveness in the credentialing process so that the White House remains accessible to all journalists,” its website boasts.



“The network of liberal journalists attempting to throw their weight around to shut out Fox News or any other truly major news outlet is reprehensible and undemocratic,” James Campbell, a political science professor at the State University of New York. “The attempt to push Fox News out of the way is wrong-headed in almost every way imaginable, from violating basic principles of free press and free speech to its antitrust implications. It also goes a long way to affirming the vast left-wing media conspiracy that many conservatives believe is out there, but had no idea was so well organized.”

Dr. Edward Wasserman, Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, told TheDC that the concern over Scherer’s participation in the selection process was a lot of concern over something of little real significance.
“That front-row seat is largely symbolic,” he said. “Besides, I don’t find it objectionable whether this guy has an opinion or not. If he thinks Fox is a third rate news outlet, he has a right to that opinion.”

Kevin Smith, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, had a different view, saying that Scherer’s comments about Fox News do raise concerns over whether he can act as an objective judge in the seat assignment process.

“The seat might not matter to the general public, but it does to Fox and Bloomberg [the other front runner for the seat which also had members on the Journolist],” he told TheDC. “Scherer’s words create a sense of inappropriateness and impropriety…I don’t think you want somebody with such prejudices making those decisions”

I just wanted to help you out by bumping this thread. After all, this story has legs but for some reason nobody is reading it.

I think if you C&P some more unsourced articles it might help round up a bunch more readers though.

Letter from Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson on The Daily Caller’s Journolist coverage


We began our series on Journolist earlier this week with the expectation that our stories would be met with a fury of criticism from the Left. A hurt dog barks, after all.

The response hasn’t been all that furious, actually, probably because there isn’t much for the exposed members of Journolist to say. We caught them. They’re ashamed. The wise ones are waiting for the tempest to pass.

There have, however, been two lines of argument that we probably ought to respond to, if only because they may harden into received wisdom if we don’t.




The first is that our pieces have proved only that liberal journalists have liberal views, and that’s hardly news.

To be clear:
We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption.

Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama.

That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.




The second line of attack we’ve encountered since we began the series is familiar to anyone who has ever published a piece whose subject didn’t like the finished product: “You quoted me out of context!”

The short answer is, no we didn’t. I edited the first four stories myself, and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.

That assurance won’t stop the attacks, of course. So why don’t we publish whatever portions of the Journolist archive we have and end the debate? Because a lot of them have no obvious news value, for one thing.

Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually.

So while it might be amusing to air threads theorizing about the personal and sexual shortcomings of various New Republic staffers, we’ve decided to pull back.



Plus, a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal. In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers.

Disappointing.

We reserve the right to change our minds about this in the future, but for now there’s an easy solution to this question: Anyone on Journolist who claims we quoted him “out of context” can reveal the context himself.

Every member of Journolist received new threads from the group every day, most of which are likely still sitting in Gmail accounts all over Washington and New York. So feel free to try to prove your allegations, or else stop making them.


One final note:
Editing this series has been something of a depressing experience for me. I’ve been in journalism my entire adult life, and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt. It’s harder to make that defense now. It will be easier when honest (and, yes, liberal) journalists denounce what happened on Journolist as wrong.

More partisan C&P!!!

Please?

too funny...

poor rush limbaugh....that hate-filled nazi would never feel any of the pain associated with even the worst of heart attacks given the fact that at any given moment, he has 20 or so oxycotin floating throughout his system.....what a dipshit he is...

Bump.

Because this story has legs!

mercury14 said:

Bump.

Because this story has legs!

Click to expand...

I blame bush for allowing you to hump your next door neighbors legs!

No it doesn't. Those people feel justified because society has gotten, in their minds, so complex that only the very best and brightest can understand it and bring to you its salient points in a format that is understandable and imparts the information you need to know about.

They have the power and will work, effectively, with the rest of the ruling class to ensure that other voices are shut out of the marketplace of ideas. Man will choose to believe the news in the format it is delivered to him by someone he respects; to this effect, we have built up to our children as we grew in our careers that college and degrees are the pinnacle of knowledge, but as we busied ourselves by growing an economy, the Left busied itself by taking over the non-productive sectors of our life with a focus on education where our youth can learn of our mistake and error in being focused on securing our fortune instead of being intelligent enough to know that we were working for the benefit of others...

The Ruling Class (American Spectator)
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the

__________________
With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and Playstations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.
Barack Hussein Obama

We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do. Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we're encouraging our young people to do that.
Michelle Obama

"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers
Professor of Education

They don't conspire as much as they just all think alike...

Many conservatives think JournoList is the smoking gun that proves not just liberal media bias (already well-established) but something far more elusive as well: the Sasquatch known as the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

I’m not so sure. In the 1930s, the New York Times deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s murders. In 1964, CBS reported that Barry Goldwater was tied up with German Nazis. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers and found that journalists identified themselves as liberal by a factor of 3 to 1. Their actual views on issues were far more liberal than even that would suggest. Just for the record, Ezra Klein was born in 1984.

In other words, JournoList is a symptom, not the disease. And the disease is not a secret conspiracy but something more like the “open conspiracy” H. G. Wells fantasized about, where the smartest, best people at every institution make their progressive vision for the world their top priority.

As James DeLong, a fellow at the Digital Society, correctly noted on the Enterprise Blog, “The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism.”

Click to expand...

Jonah Goldberg
NRO

OBAMA'S POLL NUMBERS DOWN, IMAGINARY RACISM UP


The Democrats are depressed about their collapsing poll numbers, so it's time to start calling conservatives "racist."


As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry "racism" whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama. (Ironically, this story did not make headlines.)


When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal broke during the 2008 campaign, the first response of Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent was to demand that they start randomly picking conservatives -- "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."


Ackerman, frequent guest on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," continued on Journolist:




This is what "racism" has come to in America. Democrats are in trouble, so they say "let's call conservatives racists." We always knew it, but the Journolist postings gave us the smoking gun.



This explains why we've heard so much about Tea Partiers being "racists" lately.

But despite a frantic search, the media have been unable to produce any actual evidence of racism at the Tea Parties. Even the trace elements are either frauds or utterly trivial.


For example, there was blind terror last week over a Tea Party billboard in northern Iowa that showed a picture of Adolf Hitler, Obama and Vladimir Lenin under the headings: "National Socialism," "Democratic Socialism" and "Marxist Socialism."

Overheated? Perhaps. Racist? No.
Unless liberals are about to break the news that Lenin and Hitler were black, what we have here, gentlemen, is not racism.



I'm not even sure why liberals are so testy: As an aficionado of liberal talk radio, I've heard both Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes repeatedly say socialism is terrific. (Given their ratings, this is understandable.)



Most sickeningly, the mainstream media continue to spread the despicable lie that someone called civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis the "N-word" 15 times during the anti-ObamaCare rally in Washington. Fifteen times!

That turned out to be another lie.

About a week after the protest, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of Lewis being called the N-word even once -- forget 15 times. (That's the most we can afford. Hey, who do we look like over here, George Soros?)

Plus, the winner might have his video appear on the new hit TV show, "America's Most Racist Home Videos."

With hundreds of news cameras, cell phone cameras and camcorders capturing every nook and cranny of the Capitol Hill protest -- and news media hungry for an ugly, racist act -- it defies possibility that someone called Lewis the N-word once, much less 15 times, without one single camera capturing the incident.

And yet, to this day the reward remains unclaimed.


Democrats did their best to provoke an ugly confrontation by marching a (shockingly undiverse) group of black Democrats right through the middle of the anti-ObamaCare protest. But they didn't get one, so the media just lied and asserted Lewis was called the N-word. (If they wanted to hear the N-word so badly, they should have sent the congressional delegation to a Jay-Z concert.)


Indeed, news anchor after news anchor has indignantly claimed to have footage of the incident, teasing viewers by saying, "We'll get that right up" or claiming personally to have seen the video -– and then you watch the whole program without ever seeing footage of anyone calling Lewis the N-word.

Dateline: April 18, 2010, CNN's Don Lemon: "We have the tape here at CNN. I saw it on CNN's 'State of the Union.'" And yet, Lemon never got around to showing viewers that tape.

IF YOU HAVE THE TAPE, DON, CLAIM YOUR $100,00 REWARD!



And now this week, with the NAACP accusing the Tea Partiers of harboring racists, and conservatives demanding proof, the George Soros-backed Center for American Progress ran a 45-second video allegedly showing racism at the Tea Parties.

One of the videos shows an obvious liberal plant announcing, "I'm a proud racist!" Apparently this was their best shot, because they had to work this video into the montage twice, amid utterly innocuous posters, for example, saying, "God bless Glenn Beck." So I guess they didn't have anything better.

Here's the part Soros' people didn't show you: In the fuller video shown on the Glenn Beck show, the Tea Partiers surrounded the (liberal plant) racist, jeering at him, telling him he's not one of them and to go home. In a spectacularly evil fraud, all that was edited out.



Just hours later on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was loudly proclaiming that he would believe the Tea Partiers weren't racist when he sees "just one of those Tea Party people pull down one of those racist signs at the next Tea Party rally. I'm going to just wait. Reach over, grab the sign and tear it out of the guy's hands. Then I will believe you."

Well, here it was. The (liberal plant) racist was driven from the Tea Party by the Tea Partiers. But you won't see that. Like USDA official Shirley Sherrod's apparently racist comments excerpted this week from what was, in fact, a commendable speech about racial reconciliation, the alleged Tea Party racism was, literally, "taken out of context."


COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER

Ann Coulter has pipe-stems...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExiBi0l8ck

Jamie Weinstein discusses Journolist on ‘America Live with Megyn Kelly

Daily Caller deputy editor Jamie Weinstein appeared on Fox News today to discuss revelations, first published on TheDC, that members of the liberal list-serv Journolist discussed how to strategically handle John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin to be his running mate.


Members of the liberal list-serv Journolist considered their group "the non-official campaign"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvOFEX4NrCI


The Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson talks JournoList on Hannity


Editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson appeared on ‘Hannity’ on Fox News to talk about TheDC’s investigative series looking into the liberal listserv JournoList.

Reporting from TheDC revealed journalists at mainstream publications plotting to spike unfavorable stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and how they discussed using the government to shut down Fox News.

Journalists are dishonorable losers


"What is so awful about the Journolist is that very few of the people on it seemed to step back from the bitter, childish left wing and hateful groupthink. And why should they? They all know the same people, went to similar schools, and have the same politics. Celebrating the election of Obama was one thing. But when the Journolists’s anti-Palin tsunami rose just seconds after she was named the nominee, almost no one spoke up and said, “Hey, we’ve know this woman for three minutes. Let’s have a sense of fair play. Let’s get the facts.”


The truth is, most journalists are liberal, and most of them lie. And they lie both because of bias, but more importantly because they have no sense of honor.


A few years ago a journalist friend of mine told me that a paper in DC had rewritten a story of hers to make the subject look bad. My friend complained. The editor’s response was this “The girl in your piece is fat. I was fat when I was her age. She’ll get over it.” This editor now has a senior position at TBD.com, a news website being run by media giant and ABC owner Allbitron.

Being liberal is one thing. But a man with no conscience is called a psychopath."


Mark Gauvreau Judge, the author of several books, whose articles and essays have appeared nationwide in various publications.

you outa give up

and talk Palin wardrobe

that would gain you an audience

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/07/30/article-1039989-021F26DC00000578-255_468x691.jpg

Now this story has legs.

http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/10d-20/pair-of-nude-legs.jpg

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/shara-legs.jpg