GOODY TWO SHOES: The MSM: Obama’s Unpaid Campaign Strategists
Talk about an ill-timed article. Right after Washington Post media analyst-cum-political pundit Howard Kurtz observed that, “Some of the most conservative and combative Republicans running for Congress are convinced that the media have it in for them” and attributed the hostile questioning as nothing more than “reporters challeng[ing] them on their past statements and inconsistencies, which is a basic function of journalism” and chided them for “circumventing the press” and “delight[ing] in skewering the mainstream media,” they were soundly vindicated for avoiding the MSM.
Tucker Carlson’s political news and analysis Website The Daily Caller began releasing a stream of correspondence between liberal reporters, commentators and journalism school professors from a secret listserv, JournoList, that was created - and recently shut down when its existence became widely known - by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein. Amongst the revelations, “In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race … the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president, reports The Daily Caller:
The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom. …
Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “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 [Obama] 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 wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”
Despite Klein’s complaints that Carlson selectively quotes from the listserv – The Daily Caller can post the entire archive, but can’t quote 25,000 messages in whole or part in each article, and neither would Klein had the shoe been on the other foot - many of the JournoListers considered themselves part of Obama’s “non-official campaign” instead of fair, honest observers and analysts, which is a basic function of journalism.
Comments