Liberals used to accuse Fox News of being part of a right-wing conspiracy to float blog items into the news. It turns out that they have their own conduit for doing the same thing. Politico reports, apparently for the first time, on JournoList, a listserv comprising hundreds of news reporters, opinion journalists, and bloggers, that generates a significant amount of content.
Not surprisingly, its members would rather not discuss it:
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.”
But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one — got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.
“I’m very lazy about writing when I’m not getting paid,” Alterman said. “So if I take the trouble to write something in any detail on the list, I tend to cannibalize it. It doesn’t surprise me when I see things on the list on people’s blogs.”
I’m less interested in the secrecy than I am in the hypocrisy. For years, writers on the Right have heard the accusations from our counterparts that Fox News manipulates news by coordinating with bloggers, something that in my entire five-plus years of blogging I have never seen, and I think I’d have been in a position to see it. Now it seems like those accusations were more like projection.....
