Some Reactions to the Journolist Exposure

Time Magazine's Joe Klein, writing that he has no regrets over his participation in the Journolist, began by saying,

Journalists are an oxymoronic tribe of fierce individualists.

Maybe they are a bunch of fierce individualists, but the more you hear about the Journolist, the less likely you may be to agree with hiim.  In fact you might come to quite the opposite conclusion, at least as regards the Journolist tribe.  According to Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, when the Journolist discussion wondered how best to deal with the appearance of Sarah Palin on the McCain ticket in 2008, a list of talking points emerged, which oddly enough, appeared in Joe Klein's observations about Palin.

Klein wrote this article in the first person, attributing these ideas to himself. He could just as easily have written, “Political activists are wondering about the following” in his list of issues in this first reaction to the Palin announcement.  Instead, Klein wrote, “I wonder about the following,” which misleads readers into believing that these points sprang from his own forehead as Athena from Zeus.  While Klein is very clearly an opinion journalist at Time, he represented those opinions as his own — and one has to wonder how many other talking points from JournoList Klein passed off as his own over the years at Time. 

As you might expect, Journolisters dismiss accusations of collusion.  These were just innocent conversations taken out of context.  Tucker Carlson, who has recently revealed several of these leaked email conversations, counters:

Anyone on Journolist who claims we quoted him “out of context” can reveal the context himself. Every member of Journolist received new threads from the group every day, most of which are likely still sitting in Gmail accounts all over Washington and New York. So feel free to try to prove your allegations, or else stop making them.

Howard Kurtz manages to come up with what may be the lamest of lame comments.

Carlson, who says he has withheld many "catty" personal comments, calls the out-of-context charge "a red herring designed to draw attention away from the fact that they were coordinating on behalf of Barack Obama."

None of this quite adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don't have similar discussions.

My emphasis above. 

Jay Cost welcomes the Journolist revelations.

Somehow, Ezra Klein has managed to drain a little more water out of the already shallow pool of media objectivity. He's introduced the notion that, in some instances, it may not have been a soft bias, but instead a hard one. That's exactly the kind of suspicion and mutual distrust that a party caucus breeds. And, unless the full JournoList is opened to the public, nobody will ever know for sure.

JournoList looks to me to be yet another mile-marker on this country's return to a partisan press. This does not upset me very much at all. I think American democracy is unthinkable without the political parties, so I do not think that a partisan press is all that bad.

Here's what I consider to be the nut of the issue.  We aren't returning to a partisan press.  We've always had one, but we haven't always had journalists honest enough to admit it.  Instead we've had a collection of ideologues packaging, and in this case coordinating, their predominantly hard left views and passing them off as mainstream.