First came word of the daily secret planning session phone calls between Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and several highly placed Old Media types (Here and here) and now Politico has revealed the existence of a hush, hush web message board where denizens of the lefty media get together on a daily basis and plan how they will all cover the news for the great unwashed out there.
But don't worry, this "journolist" is no great cabal of underground left-wing plotters attempting to co-opt the message emanating from the bowls of the Old Media. We know this cuz they told us so!
Move along.... nothing to see here.
Michael Calderone is soon going to find his invites to all the swankiest mau jacket required cocktail parties drying up if he keeps this sort of reporting up.
For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.
Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?
Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”
See, if ol' Ezra says it's coo, then dadgummit, whaterya'all worried about?
But, despite it being good and all, Calderone couldn't get more than three dozen of the message board's members to go on record about it.
POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests -- and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there.
Gosh, fellers. If it's all so innocent, why is everyone suddenly so shy?
Curioser and curioser.
I urge you all to go on over to Calderone's piece and read about this whole sordid business.
Oh, and after you do, I'll meet ya'all back on the RightWing-o-list so'as we can plan how to respond.
Until then... show me the secret handshake.
