Journolist: A peek inside the Ministry of Propaganda

OK, so now we know that there is a liberal media conspiracy — as if we didn’t already know that.

We also know that the liberal media will generate a massive drumbeat of propaganda to laughingly deride anyone who claims there is a “liberal media conspiracy.”

And sadly, we also know that the liberal media will largely get away with it — again.

I am talking about the Journolist controversy, which confirms everyone’s worst fears about how large elements of the media these days are nothing more than unofficial operatives for Democratic and left-wing politics.

But did you ever hear of Journolist? Or this controversy? Probably not. Because the gatekeepers of mainstream news are those very self-same liberal journalists who have been exposed as shills and hacks. They aren’t likely to be playing up this story on the front page of the New York Times.

Here are the basic facts:

Journolist was an e-mail list-serv chat group that was supposed to provide a place for journalists and news-minded people to hash out the big stories of the day and put them in context. It was private, but like all list-servs generated a huge amount of e-mail that any individual member could store and reference later. Those e-mails, written casually between like-minded individuals, have now been leaked to the public at dailycaller.com, and expose a rat’s nest of bias and collusion that would make any responsible journalist cringe.

The group was founded by Ezra Klein, who used to write for a left-wing publication, the American Prospect, but now writes for the purportedly mainstream Washington Post. Klein has confirmed that there were only a few rules for membership in Journolist. “One is that you can’t be working for the government. Another is that you’re center to left of center...”

Within that private sanctuary therefore, journalists could let down their hair and relax, speaking freely of the political stories of the day such as the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. The trouble is that reporters and opinion writers and left-wing bloggers were all sipping from the same cup, and the front-line reporters happily did the bidding of the left-wing bloggers.

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, made an intriguing comment about the role of the “non-official campaign” in destroying Palin’s credibility:

“This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official campaign shouldn’t say — very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here — scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia[n] wing-nut a heartbeat away... bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant.”

Considering the context, it is hard to see the “non-official campaign” cited by Levy as anything other than the liberal media, which so desperately wanted to replace the much-hated George W. Bush with a beloved progressive like Barack Obama.

The more you read from the now leaked e-mails the more apparent it becomes that these so-called journalists had an us vs. them mentality where “us” is “smart liberals” and “them” is “dangerous conservatives.” That divide is apparent even when the writer is trying to persuade even more radical leftists to tone it down. For instance, when Chris Hayes, a writer for the Nation, pleaded with “mainstream” journalists to ignore the Jeremiah Wright story because it just hurt Obama, another blogger wrote back to deflect his argument partly with this line: “We make distinctions — they smear.”

It is clear that the “we” is not journalists, but leftists. It is also clear throughout that the first allegiance of these so-called journalists is not to credibility and accuracy, but to a political cause. It is also clear that they DO smear.

It seems that some members of this group even went undercover as conservatives in an effort to spread left-wing propaganda more effectively. The Washington Post recently announced that it was firing its conservative news blogger David Weigel because, well, because he despised conservatives. His blog was called “Inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party with David Weigel.” It should more accurately have been called “Infiltrating the conservative movement and the Republican Party with avowed leftist David Weigel.”

A story by the Daily Caller exposed that Weigel was a member of Journolist and that he had used the list-serv as a forum to vent his hatred for conservatives. In one case, Weigel wrote that the problem with mainstream news is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how f---ing moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”

Yep, much better to just tell “real Americans” what they should think, and “educate” them so they will realize how “evil” the Republicans really are. At least, that’s the impression anyone will get who honestly looks at the “conversation” between liberal journalists that has now been exposed for all to see.

To the media elite, you and I are just morons.

That’s why everything that happened to Sarah Palin in the 2008 campaign should be questioned. That’s why all “mainstream” reporting about Barack Obama’s progressive agenda should be doubted. That’s why the campaign to smear Fox News should be seen for what it is — an effort to limit the information available to the public to what benefits the current administration.

The problem is, when the Fourth Estate works for the chief executive, not for the truth, then what we have is no longer a free press, but rather a Ministry of Propaganda.