Since 1993, Grover Norquist has held an off-the-record meeting
every Wednesday where conservative activists, policy wonks, and
government officials exchange ideas about policy and politics.
Sometimes journalists attend. Depending on a particular
journalist’s ideological and partisan disposition — which can
vary quite a lot given the state of our media landscape, which
includes both ‘straight news’ reporters (i.e. people who attempt
to hide the almost-always-left-of-center opinions that shape
their journalistic choices) and opinion journalists with various
worldviews and temperaments — journalists may be there to get
ideas that will influence how they think about issues, or they
may just be there to get perspective on how conservatives are
thinking about the issues of the day.
The Wednesday Meeting has periodically been the source of
breathless fear-mongering on the left about the all-powerful
conservative conspiracy to control media narratives. This is, of
course, absurd. Much of the hyperventilating over Journolist is
equally absurd,
John Guardiano’s included.
Everyone who has reason to be embarrassed by a direct quote in
the Daily Caller’s series on Journolist is an openly
opinionated commentator. (The one partial exception is Jeffrey
Toobin, who presents himself as a middle-of-the-road analyst on
CNN, but his weaselly nature has always been pretty obvious.)
Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by
conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That
Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before
he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates
ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not
exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly
the same thing — it’s just our emails don’t get leaked because
we’re smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs
where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This
practice is a double-edged sword — you get the benefit of
idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into
groupthink. Liberals seem
more prone to the latter failing, but that’s more a problem
for them than for anyone else, and it’s not much of a scandal.
The straight-news reporters who were on Journolist are being
accused of being complicit in the partisan hackery they
observed (even if they didn’t participate in the discussions),
but the charge doesn’t really wash unless you can look at their
work and point out how it is skewed by exposure to liberal
conversations. Orrin Judd
provides some useful perspective:
[O]ur friend Rick Perlstein was on the list and, in the
meantime, he also had his own list of pet conservatives from
whom he’d gather the opposing viewpoints. So there’s nothing
wrong with the list per se. Nor does this seem like a
conspiracy to shape the news, no matter how much a few
participants might have wished it to be one.
This brings us to the conduct of the Daily Caller
itself. It is a bit precious for Tucker Carlson, who spent years
cohosting Crossfire with James Carville and Paul Begala
— two of the most unprincipled Democratic hacks in the world —
to
act like he’s shocked, shocked to find evidence of
partisanship among liberal commentators. (By implying symmetry
between partisans on the left and opinionated but not-so-partisan
commentators on the right, by the way, Crossfire did
more to influence public discourse to the disadvantage of
conservatives than Journolist could ever hope to.)
More seriously, Carlson is being flat-out disingenuous when he
puts the burden on Journolist members to release the context of
the threads that Jonathan Strong has reported on with a gloss
that the people quoted all say is misleading. Everyone on
Journolist was party to an off-the-record agreement. As explained
above, having people trust you to keep conversations off the
record is an important part of practicing journalism. (It
shouldn’t be a surprise that
my source, who was willing to break the agreement to the
extent that he treated an off-the-record discussion as an
on-background discussion, is an academic, not a journalist.) The
Caller is in possession of the complete threads (I gave
them too much credit when
I assumed they must not be), and was not party to that
agreement. If the Caller is witholding information from
readers to sensationalize the narrative, as the people they’re
quoting all claim that they are, they are practicing tabloid
journalism.
And you know what? That’s okay! There’s room on our media
landscape for tabloid journalism. The National Enquirer
holds back information to sell more newspapers, and also pays
sources. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t value in busting John
Edwards when the mainstream media wouldn’t touch him, it just
means that when you read the National Enquirer you have
to keep in mind the kind of operation they run. If Tucker Carlson
wants to run his website like a tabloid, he’s welcome to do so —
but he shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about journalistic scruples.
