Journolist Is Dead. Long Live Journolist.

Ezra Klein, the lefty opinion writer at the Washington Post who founded Journolist, says he has decided to shut it down.  Or not.  In the next breath he predicted it would reassemble itself in a new venue.  But for now, the original Journolist is gone.

Journolist is done now. I'll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I'm proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will re-form it, with many of the same members, and keep it going.

Journolist, in case you are wondering, was a online message board where elite lefty journalists and pundits could exchange lofty notions insulated from all but like minded savants, predisposed to agree.   

At the beginning, I set two rules for the membership. The first was the easy one: No one who worked for the government in any capacity could join. The second was the hard one: The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left.  I didn't like that rule, but I thought it necessary: There would be no free conversation in a forum where people had clear incentives to embarrass each other

Diversity in the eyes of Jlisters meant macho far left lefties would tolerate the mere liberals.  Barred from the Jlist were and conservatives or libertarians who might poke holes in liberal to Marxist prejudices, or who were likely to be Journolist targets.

Journolist became an embarrassment anyway, though it took two years before anybody not on the list got wind of it.  In March, 2009 Michael Calderone wrote an article about it in Politico headlined JournoList: Inside the echo chamber.

POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests — and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there

In an e-mail, Klein said he understands that the JList’s off-the-record rule “makes it seems secretive.” But he insisted that JList discussions have to be off the record in order to “ensure that folks feel safe giving off-the-cuff analysis and instant reactions.” 

One byproduct of that secrecy: For all its high-profile membership — which includes Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman; staffers from Newsweek, POLITICO, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and The New Yorker; policy wonks, academics and bloggers such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias — JList itself has received almost no attention from the media.

The secret was out.  Shortly after Calderone's article appeared Mickey Kaus got hold of thread from the list and posted it on his blog.  Now that was embarrassing.  Get a load of the backbiting.

From: Jonathan Chait <jch...@tnr.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:27:59 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:27 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist  Perhaps, if his work is going to be brought up here  2 or 3 times a
week, he should be invited on the list. Or is the point of this to
create a forum where certain people can be criticized (or, more
precisely, called names) without the criticizer having to fear a
response? I do recall Eric Alterman going after Eve Fairbanks, and
then -- when Eve mounted a defense -- confessing that he didn't know
she was on the list, and only criticized her because he thought he was
speaking behind her back.
Is Michelle Cottle on this list? She's criticized less frequently
here, and I don't think this sort of thing interests her, but her
presence would definitely improve the list. There seems to be a junior
high quality to this list with regard to TNR, where if you're not on
it you get sniped at constantly, but if you are on it you're mostly safe.

[...]

From: Eric Alterman <era00...@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:56:38 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:56 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist  Quit lying about my record, Jonathan Chait.
Or at least check the archives before descinding into Kirchickism.
What I posted about Eve was an article I PUBLISHED. It could hardly
have been going behind her back to PUBLISH an article, could it? What
I explained when you last leveled this false accusation ... [SNIP] ...  was the fact that had I known Eve was on the list, I
would not have posted it here, even though it was relevant to the
discussion at hand, because a) I had no wish to hurt the feelings of
someone I had never met, and b) this is no less important, I respect
the value of civility on this list. As you well know, there are plenty
of attacks going on between yourself, Matt, Ezra, Spencer, and myself
that do not make it onto this list because we respect the importance
of civility here. Or at least we did....
I expect Ezra will want to intervene here, but please do feel free to
forward our exchange to Marty. I can only imagine how proud he'd
be....
n Mar 24, 2:51 pm, Michael Cohen <speechbo...@yahoo.com> wrote:

- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text -

From: Chris Hayes <christopherlha...@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:57:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist  There's a lot of people on this list routinely criticized who are not
on it, Jon. That said, I'm more than happy to call Marty Peretz a
racist to his (electronic) face.
-c

So lefty bloggers and journalists compared notes, refined their messages, and generally engaged in group think.  They argued among themselves about which conservatives were more racist, more anti-Semitic, more deserving to be smeared. 

Ezra Klein, blogger for the "liberal" American Prospect, got caught by Politico coordinating his stories with other liberal bloggers and journalists. Exposed for being a journalistic fraud, Klein needed an enemy. He found Ann Althouse. Althouse, who has a very popular blog, could be considered "conservative" (as in, when a law professor doesn't kneel at the alter of Obama, she is a "conservative").

Althouse's crime? She linked to the Politico story in a post at 8:54 a.m. on March 19, 2009 under the title "The Journolist." Althouse's blog gets tons of comments, unlike mine, which only gets a lot of comments when there is an Instalanche. Apparently, some of the comments were hostile to Klein, so Klein decided to take out Althouse by smearing her as an anti-Semite.

No, Klein didn't say that "Ann Althouse is an anti-Semite." The obvious weasel that he is, Klein did it indirectly under a post at 1:50 p.m. on March 20, 2009, titled "Are Ann Althouse's Commenters Anti-Semites?" Klein did a simultaneous Tweet with the same title. [Correction 3/21, 3:50 p.m.: The sequence was Klein tweets, Althouse objects, Klein posts the full post.]

This is how the left does it. When you can't find racist/sexist/anti-Semitic/homophobic comments by a conservative, you impugn their reputation by finding some lunatic in a crowd (or in blog comments) who did make such a comment.

Smearing techniques must have been what Klein was talking about in his farewell to Journolist blog post when he said, "It was a wonderful, chaotic, and educational experience."  It must have been.  

And we can be sure it's not over.  Son of Journolist is on the rise in this very moment, if not fully operational.  Lefty journalists and pundits will gather in secrecy to discuss how better to present their message so that the rest of us can "get it."  Thomas Frank wrote a book describing their quandary.  He called it "What's The Matter With Kansas."  Kansas, a hotbed of radical socialism a hundred years ago, twice voted for George W. Bush.  How could that have happened?  It was truly baffling!

So the quest to advance the progressive message continues.   Journolist arose as a forum for plotting strategy and pondering the impenetrable:  Why aren't those racist, anti-Semitic, rubes more receptive to progressive messages of hope, love, and equality?  Progressives continue to ponder.

Comments

[Sissy Willis]

Excellent post. I had no idea of the history, just got more or less up to speed since Weigelgate burst through the culursmog.

"How could that have happened?" is right on. They just don't get that there is intelligent life beyond the bubble (New Yorker cover of decades ago comes to mind).

[Sissy Willis]

Culturesmog, I mean. :D

[Tom Bowler]

Thanks, Sissy. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant. Exactly what progressives hoped to avoid by slithering under the Journolist rock to rework and repackage the Marxist message.