Liberal journalist Walter Shapiro, a former Carter speechwriter, self-professed JournoList member, and possessor of one of these most portentous author mug shots I’ve seen in recent memory has an article at AOL’s Politics Daily moaning about the leaker of the now infamous JournoList:
Every entry on Google Groups, where JournoList resided, ended with the cautionary line, “And remember: All postings are off-the-record.” But someone — whose motivations were mysterious and whose lack of integrity was obvious — collected all of Weigel’s back e-mails and apparently sent the most intemperate comments (ripped out of context) to FishbowlDC, a media gossip website, and the Dally Caller, a new conservative online newspaper. Weigel, who had recently been hired by The Washington Post to write about the conservative movement, resigned from his new job Friday because of the furor.
I do not know Weigel (and actually do not remember most of his postings on JournoList), but I am outraged over what happened to him. It is one thing to castigate a reporter for the accuracy of his journalism or to deride a blogger for the rigor of his arguments. But it is morally repugnant to heist someone’s e-mail comments — and to leak them in a way designed to embarrass him with the people whom he is covering. The obvious and odious parallel would be to secretly place a tape recorder on a table at a dinner party and then to turn the most inflammatory sound bites into a podcast.
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Which the average New York Times journalist would do in a second if he thought he could get a story out of it that bashed anyone to the right of Pinch Sulzberger or Frank Rich.
(Update: as a reader notes in the comments below, “Isn’t that exactly what was done to Gen. McChrystal by Rolling Stone….?”)
More from Shapiro:
In another era, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed the State Department’s code-breaking office in 1929 because, as he quaintly explained, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Translating that sentiment in modern and gender-neutral language: “Honorable people do not read each other people’s e-mails without permission.”
How laudable, how naive, how early 20th century. The zone of privacy these days stops at the edge of your thoughts. It is impossible for any group (and this means liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-road vegans) to share off-the-record ideas online without running the risk that someone will breach the bonds of trust to score cheap political points. Every time someone like Weigel is humiliated because of quickly typed off-the-cuff comments, it moves us closer to a world where we all communicate in predictable homogenized phrases because who knows where they might end up.
Yes, it will be a sad day when a writer can’t use the word “ratf*cker” to describe his subjects while he’s assigned to a column titled “Inside the conservative movement and the Republican party,” as Weigel’s masthead at the Post advertised:
Shapiro’s article is titled “The Death of JournoList: Does Privacy End at the Edge of Your Thoughts?” Which seems like a rather disingenuous question for a man of the left to ask, as this is where the terrain invariably ends up, the further and further one moves left.
Which is exactly what the nation has done since January of 2009. Newsweek, owned by the Washington Post, famously screamed on a cover story early last year that “We Are All Socialists Now.” And blogger “Doctor Zero” recently noted at Hot Air the correlation between the leviathan socialist state virtually all Beltway journalists begged for when they endorsed Obama in 2008, and the state of journalism itself.
You wanted East Germany on the Potomac? Might as well have all of the trappings, boys.
So does privacy end at the edge of your thoughts? George Orwell’s characters in 1984 could easily answer that question. As could Robert Ley, Head of the National Socialist German Labour Front from 1933-1945, who was famously quoted by Hannah Arendt as saying that “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.”
Update: “Why is no one calling for the outing of the 400 JournoList members and an investigation of whether there were any other attempts to collude and to coordinate the media narrative?”
Update: “Oh, good grief. Check out the photo if you want to see the face of modern journalism. In your nightmares . . . .”
Update: Regarding said photo, Jim Hoft adds, along with a screen capture, that at least at the moment, “It’s even on his Wikipedia page.”
Everyone who has ever spoken with a “journalist” is loving the tears and renting of clothes by “journalists” over being taken out of context, private correspondence being exposed and general disregard for “off the record.” All the more since a “journalist” just took down a general by using off the record, private conversation for his stock in trade.
“Two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them is dead.”
take a look at any McClatchy newspaper and you can see the journalistic bias to the left. how many times did i hear my uncle, who was a proud “journalist” (camera operator for a local TV station) proclaim that he wanted to see someone assasinate george dubya. he wanted to see that “ratfu#%er” dead. sheesh!
i wonder if shapiro thinks those comments made in a bar to the rolling stone writer should have been reported.
Isn’t that exactly what was done to Gen. McChrystal by Rolling Stone….?
The lefties don’t like it when someone uses their own tactics against them.
He is only mad because he and others have been exposed as the sneaky dishonest partisan hacks that they are.
Never ending destruction of the “historic USA”, through mass importation of “immigrants” (legal & illegal), little or no gentle assimilation, media that reinforces the Nanny State with faux concern over every little problem, issue (real or imagined) and “cause” (justified or nonsensical)…………and today, we wind up a weak, dependent “region” – hardly a country, that was once, strong, independent, where individual liberty was cherished – today, collectivism is the mantra pushed by a race-husling “community organizer” and his cheerleaders in academia and the media.
The USA is kaput.
And Shapiro stands where on leaking national security secrets? I’d assume on his knees in front of Lichtblau.
“But someone — whose motivations were mysterious and whose lack of integrity was obvious”
Apparently there are no whistle-blowers on Journalism World.
Hacking Sarah Palin’s email account? No big deal.
amazing. They’re still twisting around trying to make this about Weigel the poor victim.
Weigel’s problem, of course, is that revealing his true feelings makes a lot of his work seem contrived, phony and worthless. The key word here is “TRUE” feelings. The outtakes were expressions of true feelings. He is an angry, bitter, hateful leftist who pretends to be a journalist. He’s even admitted to being “rude”. But it’s more than that. He fakes his work and vents his true feelings in ‘private’, amongst friends who clearly share the Journolist because they also have private true feelings different from what they express in their phony, manipulative work.
It is what it is– an insight into the true feelings of leftist journalists. And it is confirming, not shocking. We already knew this stuff.
“Apparently there are no whistle-blowers on Journalism World.”
No enemies on the left and all that…
In my youth, I was involved in a long running high profile series of lawsuits. In the course of that I dealt daily with the press. I even became friends with some of the reporters, but trust me–even as a kid I knew NEVER to confide anything to any one of them I wouldn’t want to see in print.
I can keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.
“The obvious and odious parallel would be to secretly place a tape recorder on a table at a dinner party and then to turn the most inflammatory sound bites into a podcast.”
Or tape a conservative Florida congressman’s private conversation on a cell phone, have it printed in the NYT, then plead that it is your 1st amendment right to do so.
“But someone — whose motivations were mysterious and whose lack of integrity was obvious”
How funny! The lack of integrity of the JournoList types has been obvious to most of us for a long time now.
Where was Shapiro ca. 2004-2008 when the NYTa nd WaPo were systematically using leaks of actual classified material to undermine national security?
Sorry, but to the extent he has a point, he is not the right messenger.
fwiw, thank God the Brits and we had code-breaking operations in time to help win WW2.
Funny– a listserv of liberal journalists who never cared a whit about real national security and political dirty trick leaks, and someone decided to leak on Weigel? Who’da thunk?
Shapiro is a fool for complaining about this. A nosey reporter gets a bit of his own medicine? Nothing could be finer.
Walter Shapiro is just one more hypocrite who would approve anything (including Top Secret Security Data) leaked by an anti Republican Administration liberal source.
Well, Mr. Shapiro is just one more of those liberal journalists who hide behind their left wing ideology and snarky, condescending opinions about Americans who do not share their views.
Why is it necessary to have a secretive “journolist” of liberal journalists hiding in the shadows of their darkest progessive feelings, thoughts and ideas?
Conservative writers, bloggers and Journalists are very comfortable in espousing their Conservative views which support our Constitution and the “exceptionalism” of America. There is no need to hide your beliefs when you are proud of them and confident in expressing them.
These liberal “journalists” are truly pathetic.
“Honorable people do not read each other people’s e-mails without permission.”
He was lookng for honorable people among a group of left-wing journalists??
I needed a good laugh.
I really shouldn’t be surprised at this point – there’s been enough evidence pile up about the true character of modern journalists, but it is astonishing how… weak-minded they are. Unable to see the paralells between Weigel and McCrystal. Unable to recognize that their profession – and thus their colleagues – celebrates the leaking of damning private information. Unable to see themselves as members of the same society they cover. So self-absorbed..
Maybe that’s it. The folks in the MSM just see themselves as anthropolgists studying some primite tribe – maybe even think they’re all Jane Goodall watching chimps. Above and better than the subhumans they write about. Someone recently wrote (on PJM maybe? Can’t remember, been reading too much lately I guess) that some people are too stupid to realize they’re evil.
And regarding Shapiro and
Good grief. That’s not a mug shot, that’s a smug shot. Of a smug snot. More evidence Shapiro lacks any self-awareness. Only a devoted narcicist would green-light that photo for anything serious.
I’m reminded of Connie Chung interviewing Newt Gingrich’s mother.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Chung
A la Shapiro, were the quotes really taken “out of context”? We know the context, correct? They appeared on a forum which helps leftoid con-men agree on the lies their papers will try to spread.
“Out of context” is starting to be a common code phrase for something else entirely.
Yawn. Who cares? The game will have changed when the NYTimes is indicted for printing top secret national security info on the front page. Until then, If you want to keep a secret, keep your yap shut and your fingers off the keyboard.
The same naive fools who believe that 400 hundred “journalists” could be trusted to behave with integrity, are the same fools who argue that we can trust Iran to behave with integrity. Unfortunately for the US, many of these naive fools are influencing Obama’s foreign policy.
I trust these same “journalists” who are now “outraged” at this invasion of privacy were staunchly defending and sympathizing with Sarah Palin when her private email account was hacked? Or when that law student at Harvard was pilloried and labeled racist after her “friend” forwarded her email to all and sundry?
Due to the dearth of similar “outrage” back then, I guess they all must have been out on vacation at the time. I mean, the alternative explanation would color them as hypocrites.
“Honorable people do not read each other people’s e-mails without permission.”
C.S. Lewis’ line from The Abolition of Man immediately jumped into mind: “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
Left-liberal theology is that “honor” is an outmoded Victorian patriarchal class-bound concept. My left-wing high school English teacher taught every Shakespeare play with the obligatory criticism of various characters’ “obsession” with honor as some kind of sick, destructive fetish of overgrown boys. Honor is part of Nietzsche’s “master morality,” tainted with fascism, etc.
These people have forever estopped themselves from making appeals to honor. They have none, because they have consciously rejected honor as a worthy aspiration.
Ah. Pentagon Papers, Deep Throat – are we suppose to presume that these stories published by the mainstream media were morally repugnant?
60 Minutes, 20/20, Michael Moore … But when the MSM do it it’s “investigative journalism” at its best! Which part of the double standard were we having a hard time grasping?
But it is morally repugnant to heist someone’s e-mail comments — and to leak them in a way designed to embarrass him with the people whom he is covering. The obvious and odious parallel would be to secretly place a tape recorder on a table at a dinner party and then to turn the most inflammatory sound bites into a podcast.
The obvious parallel would be to plant a microphone in a booth at a spaghetti restaurant and then to turn some sound bites into evidence against the Mafia.
The JournoList was set up as a conspiracy to promote the interests of its invitation-only left-wing members — to advance left-wing policy positions, to share and coordinate the spin on current topics, to promote one another’s careers. It may not have been a criminal conspiracy … but perhaps it was; we’ll never know unless the conspirators come clean with the archives. Do the archives contain evidence of “actual malice” relevant to libel suits, or evidence of libel within the JournoList itself? Do they contain evidence of the coverup of other crimes, such as the release of classified information? Did the participants act to blacklist people of non-leftist ideologies? Did they promote employment discrimination of other sorts? I suspect the answer is “Hell, yes!” to several of these questions.
Left-wingers like to talk about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Here we have an actual left-wing conspiracy in which even the names of the participants aren’t known … and oddly enough, our respectable mainstream journalists show no interest at all in discovering which of their colleagues are involved. The conspirators are practicing — and ruthlessly trying to enforce — omertà, the Mafia code of silence. I would not want to be the leaker when the Juice-Box Mafia finds out who blew the whistle on them.
And wouldn’t you love to have a transcript of the past week’s JournoList traffic, when they realized that they all were vulnerable to being exposed?
Am I the only one who noticed that the 28 year old Weigel dyed his hair gray for that WaPost masthead? Is America the only country in the world where journos all want to look like Anderson Cooper and where a bunch of 39 year olds would give their left nut to get the last stand up slot on K-podunk’s evening newscast? When did American journalism get so dang old? And where do all those journos live with their four or five roommates while waiting for the chance to finally make decent money?
Journos can be pretty thin skinned, but then they have a lot to be thin skinned about.
The moral and intellectual obtuseness of Shapiro’s jeremiad against those who would reveal journalists’ after-hours gossip is nothing short of stunning. To be so utterly ignorance of the rich, rich irony in his scolding of would-be tattlers about HIS right to privacy is just too delicious to bear. Can it be that Journolisters are so bereft of self-knowledge and soul-searching that they will remain mute in the face of the shameless hypocrisy of Shapiro’ statement.
I followed a lot of journalists on twitter, including Weigel. Twitter is very public. He made the same kind of comments there. Why do I emphasize this? Because his attitude wasn’t a carefully kept secret that only was revealed on Journolist. He was public about it. Whatever he tweeted I’m sure he also said to friends at parties or in bars. You could take his accumulated tweets and make as good a case as with the excerpts from Journolist (and I was tempted many times).
He was not a victim of an “outing.” His attitude was not a secret.