At the Washington Post’s “Plum Line” blog, former JournoList member Greg Sargent issues the Post’s current modified limited hangout for their writers’ involvement in the JournoList. “Journolist flap shows conservative media conspiracy, not liberal one:”
In other words, the headline on this story could have been: “J-List founder ruled out conspiracy.” That might not have been suitable as a lead story, however. Just pause for a moment to consider how amazingly misleading this is: The same thread in which the founder of J-List ruled out any conspiracy is the basis for an enormous headline claiming J-List “debated” making it a conspiracy!…
The Daily Caller builds stories by cherry-picking from threads about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh — and gets rewarded with pickup on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It does a story transforming J-List discussion about Sarah Palin into “coordination,” and Palin — who’s fast becoming a media figure in her own right — responds by giving it a big push herself. And on and on.
The real story here is that right wing media are engaged in a coordinated, conspiratorial effort to pretend that J-List proves that there is a Vast Left-wing Media Conspiracy, when the evidence conclusively shows otherwise.
Back in 2004, Dan Rather first attempted to tut-tut away RatherGate by attacking “partisan political operatives:”
“Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people, including many who are partisan political operatives, concentrated not on the key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story,” Rather castigated. But his lame defense ignored key challenges to the documents’ typography and content, and the doubts voiced by the widow and son of the supposed author, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Instead, Rather chose to repeat his indictment of President Bush’s National Guard service. Rather arrogantly concluded: “If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far there is none.”
That worked out well for all concerned. (Last year, after decades of famously seeing no bias, Dan was spotted doing fundraisers for the far left magazine, The Nation. I’m pretty sure they qualify as “partisan political operatives.”) Does the Post, already facing a myriad of problematic issues, really want to continue down the same path that CBS already tread?
Related: Andrew Klavan at City Journal on the “Empire of Silence: Journolist, Breitbart, and what the Left doesn’t say.”
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