It's Good to Know Who's Cooking Your News
Kevin O'Brien, Cleveland Plain Dealer
July 29, 2010
I used to say the liberal bias of the American news media was not the result of some dark conspiracy. I meant it, too.
It's a harder argument to make than it used to be.
The Daily Caller, a Web-based news outlet with a conservative political slant, has been having a field day lately, quoting from posts on a listserv called the Journolist.
A listserv is an e-mail-driven communication tool used by people with a common interest. When a member posts a comment to the listserv's e-mail address, it is then distributed to all of the other members by e-mail.
The Journolist, started in 2007 by liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, linked several hundred journalists, political operatives and eggheads, until The Daily Caller started making public the things they had been saying to one another.
Their common interest was Barack Obama -- ensuring his election, promoting his agenda and savaging his critics.
The Journolist is no more. The political operatives got away unscathed and the eggheads are safe in their classrooms, but the journalists deservedly have egg on their faces.
You know you've got the drop on a liberal newsie when she's compelled to say something like, "I made poorly considered remarks about Rush Limbaugh to what I believed was a private e-mail discussion group from my personal e-mail account."
That would be Journolist member Sarah Spitz, a producer for public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., who posted a little fantasy about how much she would enjoy watching the conservative talk radio host die of a heart attack.
She said she would "laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out."
And here we thought that hate -- the very word Spitz used to describe her own feelings about Limbaugh later in her post -- was the exclusive property of the right. Postings on the Journolist prove otherwise.
While Journolist members were discussing strategies for suppressing news about Obama's America-bashing pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., during the presidential campaign, Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent and now of Wired magazine, suggested this:
"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."
Obviously.
Everyone on the listserv felt much better after Obama won. There were tears (rhetorical, one presumes), cheers, f-bombs of happiness and lots of backslapping among Journolist members for a job well done.
And what members of the general public didn't know wouldn't hurt them.
Oops.
You still may have to snoop around a bit to find the Journolist story. Not all of America's newspapers, for instance, seem to think it's worthy of any mention. But it's out there and it's not going away. The Daily Caller seems to be milking it for all it's worth -- and good for The Daily Caller.
It does make the questions at public gatherings a little harder for responsible journalists to answer, though.
Here's the situation as I see it, having spent 30 years in journalism -- and every day of those 30 years far out of step with the predominant political culture of my workplace:
The problem is not that the mainstream media try to keep conservatives out. Nobody asks an entry-level applicant for a reporting job about his or her politics. It just doesn't matter.
The problem is that, because of what they read and what they see, conservatives perceive the media environment as uninviting or even hostile, so they find something else to do with their talents.
The left-wing bias that results is unintentional and passive -- and thus in no way comparable to the active discussion of strategy and tactics on view in the Journolist postings.
It's impossible to say how much influence the Journolist posters had in creating a favorable public perception of Obama and shouting down his critics. They certainly didn't hurt him.
But the cloud they have cast over journalism has a silver lining. The revelation of their scheming will make at least a few more people question the quality of their news in a country that desperately needs more skeptics.
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