Conspiracy not group think (or) Journolist and news media bias

This is huge. If it turns out to be legit.

I sort of followed the whole David Weigel on Journolist brouhaha that led to his being let go by the Washington Post. But leftist bias in the news media is old and tired and overwhelming. I want to enjoy life. Not read Newsbusters and be angry all the time.

Since undergraduate days have been an observer of the press aka the news media. In those days it was print and television and radio. About half the articles I wrote for the Cornell Review “the conservative voice on campus” were about the news media.

Okay so the news media is predominantly leftist aka “liberal”. We already know that. But why? And do they know that? For a long time assumed it was as simple as group think.

1. Most journalists (of whichever media) happen to lean left in their social-political views.
2. This colors their reporting. What they cover. How they cover. Questions they ask. Language they use.
3. These journalists with their left wing bias encourage and reinforce each other. Group think. Not conspiracy.

And that was just the way it was. Pervasive. Irritating. Annoying. But what could we do about it?

Two words: Internet. 2008.

The Internet alone has greatly challenged the monopoly of the “Mainstream Media”. We can get other news. From other sources. That is covered differently.

But in my opinion 2008 was the watershed year. The presidential election.

That is the year when the Mainstream Media took off the mask and chose sides. The left wing bias was no longer subtle. It was no longer “okay so most of us journalists lean to the left but we are still professionals and care about covering the news in a fair balanced manner”. And we could no longer say “well at least we are still getting the news we just have to filter out some of the bias”.  In many ways we were just not getting the news at all. And what news we got was so slanted it could no longer be filtered – it had been fundamentally transformed into something else.

In a way I felt like the news media had chosen sides in a soft civil war – against “middle America”. Against those of us who still believe in a federal republic based on and governed by the Constitution. Against those of us who believe in liberty opportunity responsibility and security.

For about ten years I got most of my news from National Public Radio. Was it biased? Yeah. But it was still thorough coverage of the issues. I could “filter” it.

I seldom listen any more.

(One could also mention cable.)

Enough background. Back to the news.

The Journolist is a listserv in which several hundred journalists (along with some professors and activists) participated. There are many such listservs for just about every group concerning just about every area of interest. I know of listservs for Hebrew language and Jewish studies. There is one for the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at Louisiana State University.

Sometimes these listservs are considered private. Sort of like email. It is considered a breach of confidentiality or at least of propriety to share the content of these conservations with people outside the group. In my opinion such groups are entitled to set their own rules. Public or private.

Journolist was very private. And like Climategate the problem is not a private listserv. The problem is what people were saying and doing under cover of that privacy.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, 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.

Read the whole thing at The Daily Caller.

It appears that journalists actively worked behind the scenes to effect coverage of the presidential campaign. In Barack’s Obama favor.

A few caveats. And they are important.

1. Who is The Daily Caller? Does s/he really have these Journolist archives? Frankly “according to records obtained by The Daily Caller” does not inspire my confidence. Who else has seen these? Is there a way to confirm they are authentic?
2. Just because a bunch of journalists on a private listserv say “we are going to do something about this” (attack journalists who in any way even remotely make Barack Obama look bad) does not mean it happened. People say “we should do something about this” all the time. What did these journalists actually do as a result of these conversations?
3. What about context? Many of the journalists cited are with The Nation which is hardly mainstream. Oh wait. It is.

I think the true significance of the Journolist archives might not lie in what these journalists achieved – would the Republicans still have lost? would Hillary Clinton have been the Democratic nominee? – but in how it exposes the mindset of many journalists.

Ann Althouse (whose blog is read by millions as opposed to my hundreds) has two great posts on this.

In one she ridicules the plight of feminists who had to “wave aside as politically irrelevant” the very anti-feminist personal behavior of one William Jefferson Clinton:

Ah! How Katha suffered for Bill Clinton! She would prefer to have a more pleasurable life, full of the fun of being true to the principles of the feminist movement, but there were more important things to be done at the time. Caring about rape, sexual harassment, male privilege, and female subordination — that was a self-indulgence brave Katha [Pollitt of The Nation] rose above.

Heh. Yet this is not unrelated to another issue which is the astonishing lack of ethical considerations:

But in The Daily Caller quotes, they only ask what will work best. They don’t even throw in as a makeweight argument that it would be more ethical to refrain from calling their opponents racists.

Another distinction is that Alinsky was talking about rules for political activists, not journalists. Even as means are subordinated to ends, journalism is subordinated to political activism. (emphasis added)

That last clause is the money quote. It is why I believe 2008 was the critical turning point for the relationship between the news media and the American people. Before 2008 I think there was always political activism but it was often subordinated (if barely) to journalism. 2008 is the year in which that relationship flipped. Journalism began to serve the ends of political activism.