The Daily Caller exposé of the JournoList listserv was a parody of a modern major newspaper investigation. It ran for days, bristled with indignation, amounted to almost nothing, and made its case out of various whiffs and hints of perfidy.
And here’s the Washington Independent‘s Spencer Ackerman saying fight fire with tar. “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists.”
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The discussion led to collective action: a letter that deplored the moderators’ preoccupation with Wright during an ABC debate of Democratic presidential candidates. Forty JournoList members signed the letter; that’s one in ten, a measure of collectivism’s limits among journalists, even when the cause is greater professionalism. And if memory serves, it was the speech of a lifetime that got Barack Obama past Wright, not the letter, nor the Washington Independent calling Rove a racist. (Did it? Asked to comment by the Daily Caller, Rove “said he found it curious that such talk was tolerated within the group.” But if he remembered actually being called a racist, he didn’t say so.)
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: “None of this adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don’t have similar discussions. But there is no escaping the fact that some of the list’s liberal literati come off sounding like cagey political operatives.”
Van Slyke calls herself a JournoList “lurker” who rarely contributed but read with delight. “It was really great debate and analysis by a lot of reporters and policy experts,” she says. “It was a fabulous place to learn. But it was not a place to coordinate anything.”
Ezra Klein shut down JournoList, but a smaller successor, the ironically named Cabalist, started right up. Van Slyke won’t say if she joined. “The general public doesn’t care,” she says, on the subject of who’s talking to whom. “There are small groups on the right and left who do care. What really bothers me is how the right wing is using this to once again defame progressive media, and journalists in general.”
And the other point, said Hayes, is that he puts a lot of thought into what he writes, but less when he’s sounding off on a listserv, which, it turns out, is no sanctuary. So he’s not joining Cabalist. “In the wake of this whole thing I got off every listserv I was on,” Hayes said. “It was ‘OK, fine, that’s the new rules. I will call people up if I want to have a private conversation.’”
