Contentions has some great coverage of the JournoList scandal:
- 07.23.2010 - 7:15 AM
Apparently, some are criticizing the Journolist revelations because it’s not news that the liberals are liberals. Yes, imagine the critics yawning at the revelation of a conservative Journolist discussion in which right-leaning pundits wished death or fantasized about doing bodily harm to liberal columnists. Imagine them shrugging shoulders if they heard the right fanning out after winnowing down the arguments in defense of their beloved candidate. Hard, isn’t it? It’s so silly only Journolisters could have come up with it.
Howard Kurtz isn’t buying it:
But there is no getting around the fact that some of these messages, culled from the members-only discussion group Journolist, are embarrassing. They show liberal commentators appearing to cooperate in an effort to hammer out the shrewdest talking points against the Republicans — including, in one case, a suggestion for accusing random conservatives of being racist.
By the way, his conclusion is a head-scratcher. After amply documenting the conspiracy of left-wing hackery, he writes (my comments in brackets): “None of this quite adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy [it doesn't?], and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don’t have similar discussions [the double negative is the giveaway for the unsupportable slur].”
Tucker Carlson responds to the “nothing to see here” argument in this way:
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.
It goes beyond that, in fact. The pose of the left punditocracy is that those on the right are angry, unreasoned, thuggish, and motivated by less than high-minded ideals. They’ve written column after column to that effect. In short, it’s not merely the intellectual corruption, indeed fraud, that Carlson has revealed; it is the worst sort of hypocrisy — verging on projection. The angry white men and the hate-filled political marionettes aren’t on talk radio. They’re on Journolist.
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