Statements by JournoList members and responses
On July 20, 2010, The Daily Caller (DC) published the dialog of the JournoList concerning Jeremiah Wright.[12]
The contributors discussed killing the Wright story, as it was reflecting negatively on Barack Obama. In a separate discussion, about an ABC News-sponsored debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton, 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".[12] James Taranto observed that one JournoList contributor,
Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent, stated "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".[13]
Ackerman was also quoted as saying, "find a right winger’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."[14] In response, Daily Caller commentator Jim Treacher posted a photo of a building with multiple plate glass-windows destroyed with text over the building reading "Ackerman Wuz Hear" (a LOLCats reference).[15]
The Daily Caller published a story by Jonathan Strong on July 21 about JournoList members wanting the federal government to shut down Fox News. According to Strong, Jonathan Zasloff, a UCLA law professor, wrote that the government should be able to pull the broadcasting license of the cable channel.[16] But Zasloff later said Strong did not correctly characterize his comment, which was "really more of a question than anything else, and nobody really picked up on it. That turns into my demand to shut down Fox News?"[17] The article also reported that one member of the discussion group, Sarah Spitz, a producer for a public affairs radio program at a National Public Radio affiliate station, wrote that she would laugh if she saw conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh have a heart attack in front of her.
"On JournoList," according to the DC article, "where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it [the comment] barely raised an eyebrow". On the day Strong's story was published, Spitz apologized for the comment.[18] The article also quoted Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News, comparing members of the Tea Party movement to Nazis.[16] Strong wrote, "In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil".[16]
Strong also published an op-ed in the New York Post scolding members of Journolist for violating the "tenants" [sic] of journalism. Strong was criticized by members of the list for failing to follow basic journalistic rules of conduct, such as calling or even making an effort to reach some people he was quoting in the stories and deliberately omitting responses from others. An article about the Daily Caller by the Columbia Journalism Review one year later concluded the series had been "swinging at air" and chronicled many of journalistic sins committed by Strong and the Daily caller, including non-disclosure of material facts, out-of-context material, and failure to abide by basic rules of fairness such as giving story subjects an opportunity to comment. {
http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_great_right_hype.php?page=all}
Jeffrey Toobin, journalist at The New Yorker and CNN, wrote regarding the pick of Sarah Palin as running mate to John McCain, "what a joke. . . . I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale."[19][20]
Tucker Carlson, who edited several of Strong's articles about Journolist, wrote in a July 22 article: "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. [...] 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".[21]
Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, discussed JournoList saying, ". . .
hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism".[22]
A ton of JournoList messages were made public. There's no other conclusion to be drawn.
/trumped
