Last month, David Weigel, a young Washington Post blogger hired to report on conservative politics, ostensibly from a sympathetic perspective, left the Post thanks to his damning statements on JournoList (conservatives are racists, Rush Limbaugh should die, etc.).
Now the diaper is coming off entirely. Perhaps stretching the diaper metaphor too far, what's inside JournoList may stink, but it's no surprise that it does. JournoList e-mails obtained by the Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don't like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They tend to ascribe evil motives to their political opponents - sometimes even when they know it's unfair. One obscure blogger insisted that liberals should arbitrarily demonize a conservative journalist as a racist to scare conservatives away from covering stories that might hurt Obama.
Oh, and - surprise! - it turns out that the "O" in JournoList stands for "Obama."
In 2008, participants shared talking points about how to shape coverage to help Obama. They tried to paint any negative coverage of Obama's racist and hateful pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as out of bounds. Journalists at such "objective" news organizations as Newsweek, Bloomberg, Time, and The Economist joined conversations with open partisans about the best way to criticize Sarah Palin.
Like an Amish community raising a barn, members of the progressive community got together to hammer out
talking points. Amidst a discussion of Palin, Chris Hayes, a writer for The Nation, wrote: "Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get." Time's Joe Klein admitted to his fellow JournoListers that he'd collected the listserv's bric-a-brac and fashioned it into a brickbat aimed at Palin.
news.yahoo.com
