Beregond's Bar

Lots of people have argued that what is commonly called “MSM” or “Main Stream Media” (or variations thereof that were funny the first hundred times you heard them) was made up of a bunch of Leftists. These Leftists were actually a secret cabal that manipulated the news to create an environment that was hostile to those not of the political Left. On a really good day they could actually change history by carefully shaping the narrative.

In plain black and white pixels it looks like crazy talk. When you read it aloud it sounds like the ravings of a deranged conspiracy theorist. I mean, come on now, we’re reasonable people here, and there’s obviously a sensible explanation that doesn’t involve the people we trust to deliver the news to us trying to screw with our heads.

I have long been of the opinion that the obvious slant found in the news that was unveiled as alternate news sources began to develop were a result of environment and training. In broadcast journalism classes in college I was taught that the REAL news, the things that everyone needed to know, were on the front page of the New York Times. It might on rare occasions be scooped by the Washington Post, or even occasionally by the Los Angeles Times, but that was rare enough not to worry about. The front page of the New York Times was the yardstick.

I thought that a Times fixation combined with a bunch of people who weren’t trained in the hard sciences to ground them and had a major or minor in journalism or broadcasting was enough explanation by itself. Add in self selection in the newsroom so that it becomes filled with people that find each other more or less congenial. Then make those people with common training and backgrounds chase a limited number of stories. Voila! No conspiracy needed. (Gosh I’m smart.) Stop worry over fantasies of conspiracies, there are real issues to pursue.

Except it turns out I was wrong. At the end of June e-mails were leaked from a private e-mail list called “Journolist.” These e-mails were written by Dave Weigel, a writer hired by the Washington Post to enhance their online presence by blogging about conservatives. The e-mails showed that he was not unbiased on the subject of conservatives. Excerpts from Weigel’s own account are here. If you want his whole life story to see how he got to that point Weigel wrote it all for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government here.

It was announced that the Journalist had been shut down. It wasn’t really a big deal, nothing to see here, move along. Breitbart wasn’t buying it. What he was buying, if anyone would sell, was a full archive of the Journalist. He offered $100,000 for full archives, with the source fully protected. As he wrote at the time “$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save.”

It looks like The Daily Caller beat Breitbart to at least partial archives. The excerpts released so far show clearly how badly I was wrong.

There was a conspiracy. Around 400 political activists, journalism professors and journalists participated on an e-mail list where they plotted to shape the news.  When the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright, who had been Obama’s pastor for 20 years and famously shouted “God DAMN America!” from his pulpit became a campaign issue the members of Journalist began to talk about how to deflect attention from the issue. If it had just been a matter of journalists conspiring to deflect attention or bury the story it would have been bad enough. But that was just the start.

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.”

That’s right. This collection of objective journalists was ready to use one of the worst accusations that can be made in modern America against innocent people in order to keep conservatives in line.

Fast forward to summer of 2009. Tea Party activists show up at town hall meetings held by members of congress all over the country. The members of the Journalist talk about the “violence” of the Tea Party people (when in fact the only violence had been directed against Tea Partiers) and likened them to Brown Shirts.

Not being content with casting aspersions on the opposition they began discussing trying to get the broadcast license for Fox News pulled. (The irony of a law professor not knowing that a network doesn’t have a license to pull.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

As Glenn Reynolds notes: “Stalinist by instinct, aren’t they?”

So mark today down in your diary. I was wrong. It wasn’t just group think. There is a conspiracy in the liberal media to lie to us in order to protect those they favor.

No related posts.