Whistling Past the JournoList Graveyard
By Doctor Zero
Leftist writers and pundits have been trying to stroll past the crater left by the Daily Caller’s JournoList bombshell, hands stuffed in their pockets and eyes rigidly forward. Over at the Caller, Jim Treacher provides a roundup of reaction from across the blogosphere (look for a familiar name!) He includes a few gems from liberals, including David Corn of Mother Jones asking, “And this is the best they can do?”
Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.
The symphony of whistles from the Left as they try to creep past the JournoList graveyard is deafening. It’s not going to work, comrades. This scandal is going to draw blood. Here are a few reasons why the wounds won’t be closing any time soon:
There’s more to come. Tucker Carlson has donned the bloodstained, skull-and-crossbones bow tie of battle. He promises more red meat from the JournoList archives. Anyone who has studied the tao of Breitbart knows the first revelations are not the worst. The way to turn the Left’s control of media against itself is to save the really devastating material for later, and release it on a timetable that keeps the story sizzling. The Blatant Beast is defeated by feeding it a story it cannot help repeating. The dark cloud forming over the absurd defenses deployed by liberal reporters today is the shadow of incoming rounds from the second volley.
This story will hook independents. The Daily Caller has treated conservatives to the unique sensation of being shocked by revelations that don’t surprise us a bit. We’ve known this stuff was going on for years. The Reverend Wright story is one of many examples where media bias is easily detected by simply reversing the political alignment of the principles, and asking what the media coverage would be like.
It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the reaction to the discovery of John McCain’s twenty-year association with a chapter of the Klan, followed by a major speech in which McCain described the Kleagle as “an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy,” whom he could “no more disown than he could disown the white community.” If that wasn’t enough to fill newsrooms with stroke victims, the craven decision to throw the Kleagle under the bus a few days later, after one more outrageous statement, would have done the trick.
For independents who don’t follow politics closely, the JournoList scandal provides a simple, blatantly obvious narrative about fraud and propaganda. A sizable segment of the “journalist” population stands revealed as sputtering extremists, who talk about killing stories and destroying people’s lives to protect their favored political candidate. Yes, these people are self-professed liberals – they’re not pretending to be “objective” reporters or news anchors – but the cross-pollination between “liberal” and “objective” journalists is a blindingly obvious matter of public knowledge, and the things they’re talking about doing are vile, underhanded, and conspiratorial.
The general public will be able to digest this story, and they won’t like the taste. They’ve already got a low opinion of journalists. It will plummet even further once they get a few bites of JournoList. No magazine, newspaper, or network that continues to employ any of the people quoted in the Daily Caller story can be trusted by any fair-minded person as a reliable news source. Period.
The discussion of false racism charges is an outrage. The American public is growing very tired of being pummeled with the racism club. The cynical plan to pick a random conservative – “who cares?” – and slander them as racists will mix with disgust at the NAACP for trying the same wretched tactic on the Tea Party movement. The once-feared Race Card is looking rather tattered around the edges. The Left has been putting a lot of effort into shuffling those cards into the deck for the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. The nitwits at JournoList just made them much more difficult to play.
The public is looking for ways to forget it voted for Obama. A narrative of fraud and deception is building around the 2008 election, as the polls for this disastrous presidency plummet. People who don’t want to admit they voted for Obama have an appetite for believing they were tricked into doing so. Laying blame at the feet of a media they increasingly distrust will be very attractive.
A rational, informed electorate wouldn’t have allowed Obama to survive the Reverend Wright scandal. A great deal of media manipulation was necessary to slip him past such obstacles, and into the White House. It will be somewhat comforting to think it was all an expensive prank by the JournoList frat boys.
I don’t think it’s healthy, or desirable, for the public to let itself off the hook so easily. America must fully understand the Obama mistake to ensure it is never repeated. However, I can see why people would prefer to embrace a simpler explanation. There will be a real hunger to find one in the material released by the Daily Caller. That’s one of the big reasons this story isn’t going away any time soon. It has the coarse texture and rotting smell of the very last straw for the unhappy consumers of the mainstream media, and the angry marks of the Obama swindle.
By Doctor Zero
Leftist writers and pundits have been trying to stroll past the crater left by the Daily Caller’s JournoList bombshell, hands stuffed in their pockets and eyes rigidly forward. Over at the Caller, Jim Treacher provides a roundup of reaction from across the blogosphere (look for a familiar name!) He includes a few gems from liberals, including David Corn of Mother Jones asking, “And this is the best they can do?”
Taylor Marsh grins through the flop-sweat to assure us conspiracy to defraud the dwindling audience of the dinosaur media, and slander innocent people as racists, is no big deal when “avowed and openly progressive reporters” do it. I guess we’re supposed to take it as a given that all progressives are liars and smear artists, so we’ve got no right to complain when they’re caught lying and smearing people. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressives gotta try throwing a white sheet over Fred Barnes to save Obama from a scandal that should have finished off his campaign.
The symphony of whistles from the Left as they try to creep past the JournoList graveyard is deafening. It’s not going to work, comrades. This scandal is going to draw blood. Here are a few reasons why the wounds won’t be closing any time soon:
There’s more to come. Tucker Carlson has donned the bloodstained, skull-and-crossbones bow tie of battle. He promises more red meat from the JournoList archives. Anyone who has studied the tao of Breitbart knows the first revelations are not the worst. The way to turn the Left’s control of media against itself is to save the really devastating material for later, and release it on a timetable that keeps the story sizzling. The Blatant Beast is defeated by feeding it a story it cannot help repeating. The dark cloud forming over the absurd defenses deployed by liberal reporters today is the shadow of incoming rounds from the second volley.
This story will hook independents. The Daily Caller has treated conservatives to the unique sensation of being shocked by revelations that don’t surprise us a bit. We’ve known this stuff was going on for years. The Reverend Wright story is one of many examples where media bias is easily detected by simply reversing the political alignment of the principles, and asking what the media coverage would be like.
It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the reaction to the discovery of John McCain’s twenty-year association with a chapter of the Klan, followed by a major speech in which McCain described the Kleagle as “an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy,” whom he could “no more disown than he could disown the white community.” If that wasn’t enough to fill newsrooms with stroke victims, the craven decision to throw the Kleagle under the bus a few days later, after one more outrageous statement, would have done the trick.
For independents who don’t follow politics closely, the JournoList scandal provides a simple, blatantly obvious narrative about fraud and propaganda. A sizable segment of the “journalist” population stands revealed as sputtering extremists, who talk about killing stories and destroying people’s lives to protect their favored political candidate. Yes, these people are self-professed liberals – they’re not pretending to be “objective” reporters or news anchors – but the cross-pollination between “liberal” and “objective” journalists is a blindingly obvious matter of public knowledge, and the things they’re talking about doing are vile, underhanded, and conspiratorial.
The general public will be able to digest this story, and they won’t like the taste. They’ve already got a low opinion of journalists. It will plummet even further once they get a few bites of JournoList. No magazine, newspaper, or network that continues to employ any of the people quoted in the Daily Caller story can be trusted by any fair-minded person as a reliable news source. Period.
The discussion of false racism charges is an outrage. The American public is growing very tired of being pummeled with the racism club. The cynical plan to pick a random conservative – “who cares?” – and slander them as racists will mix with disgust at the NAACP for trying the same wretched tactic on the Tea Party movement. The once-feared Race Card is looking rather tattered around the edges. The Left has been putting a lot of effort into shuffling those cards into the deck for the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. The nitwits at JournoList just made them much more difficult to play.
The public is looking for ways to forget it voted for Obama. A narrative of fraud and deception is building around the 2008 election, as the polls for this disastrous presidency plummet. People who don’t want to admit they voted for Obama have an appetite for believing they were tricked into doing so. Laying blame at the feet of a media they increasingly distrust will be very attractive.
A rational, informed electorate wouldn’t have allowed Obama to survive the Reverend Wright scandal. A great deal of media manipulation was necessary to slip him past such obstacles, and into the White House. It will be somewhat comforting to think it was all an expensive prank by the JournoList frat boys.
I don’t think it’s healthy, or desirable, for the public to let itself off the hook so easily. America must fully understand the Obama mistake to ensure it is never repeated. However, I can see why people would prefer to embrace a simpler explanation. There will be a real hunger to find one in the material released by the Daily Caller. That’s one of the big reasons this story isn’t going away any time soon. It has the coarse texture and rotting smell of the very last straw for the unhappy consumers of the mainstream media, and the angry marks of the Obama swindle.