The Journo-list wasn’t exactly the A-List of New York/Washington journalism-but it did include people whose bylines insiders know and who are to some extent the backbench of establishment journalism. Some like Joe Conason are established as columnists of the left, their views no surprise to anyone, while at least one appeared to Washington Post editors as sufficiently neutral in politics to be hired specifically to cover conservatives.
Journo’s plotting to ruin anybody who dared to report or comment on the Obama-Reverend Wright relationship came to light in a Daily Caller scoop. The increasingly hot Caller reported on heated exchanges on the Journo-list after what participants regarded as traitorous questioning of candidate Obama by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”). The Caller reported:
Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists.”
John Podhoretz has a good piece in today’s New York Post headlined “Steering the Press,” in which he makes a good case that the Journo-list campaign was highly effective in making the subject of Wright (and indeed other subjects potentially embarrassing to Obama) off limits. Andrew Sullivan, for once on the right side, finds the list corrupt.
Praising one of the contributors to the skies, Andrew nevertheless admits:
But the attitude in this email is still not, to my mind, the attitude of a journalist. It is the attitude of a political activist.
Ya think, Andrew?
My hope, based on recent developments, including charges of racism aimed at the Tea Party movement, is that the all-purpose charge of racism will be defanged. Sure, there are some rotten apples, but this is not a racist country and it’s hardly racist to believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. I hope that the racism charge will one day be hurled only at-well-racists.