JournoList: DISGUSTING

The revelations about JournoList, unearthed by The Daily Caller, should be shocking -- the slimy details, the names, the scheming, the total lack of journalistic integrity displayed by so-called journalists.

But the secrets don't shock me, even though Jonathan Strong's JournoList exposé is so damning.

The lib media members of JournoList operate in a thoroughly dishonest, unprofessional manner.

I am now certain of my utter lack of trust and respect for the lib media. No doubts anymore. In my opinion, the lib media are propaganda peddlers, not journalists. The truth doesn't matter to them.

The era of reporting hard news with a semblance of objectivity and decency is over. It's dead.

Yesterday, we read "Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright."

Today, Strong provides another installment: "Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News."

Strong writes:

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

Good God!

Spitz is an awful human being. Her hatred is truly scary.

If you spend any time online in political forums, you've likely encountered the sort of vitriol spewed by Spitz. But I usually assume such comments come from "anonymous" sickos who get off on being jerks without the consequences of accountability for their behavior.

This is different. JournoList members weren't nameless. They proudly owned their ugliness, yapping away in their bubble of hate.

Sarah Spitz of NPR, we know the real you. Not pretty.

In the summer of 2009, agitated citizens from across the country flocked to town hall meetings to berate lawmakers who had declared support for President Obama’s health care bill. For most people, the protests seemed like an exercise in participatory democracy, rowdy as some of them became.

On Journolist, the question was whether the protestors were garden-variety fascists or actual Nazis.

“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”

Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).”

Take note, my fellow conservative and politically moderate Americans. This is what the liberal media elite think of you.

These JournoListers are sick. They're such extremists, like terrorists.

...On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.

When the writer Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article about immigration for National Review, for example, blogger Ed Kilgore didn’t even bother to grapple with Hanson’s arguments. Instead Kilgore dismissed Hanson’s piece out of hand as “the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement. It’s very close in spirit to the classic 1970s racist tome, The Camp of the Saints, where White Guys struggle to make up their minds whether to go out and murder brown people or just give up.”

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.”

Amazing. Amazing.

Although I'm not shocked by these comments from the JournoListers, I'm deeply saddened by their expressions of anger and their abandonment of the fundamental principles of our nation.

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

The Leftist media have zero tolerance for those of us with opinions that differ from their own.

Complaints about liberal bias in the media aren't baseless. The bias is real. It exists. The Leftists gathered online to discuss strategy. Their efforts were coordinated to achieve their goals. They plotted to influence the 2008 election. JournoList was a hatefest.

It's so depressing.

One nation, under God.

Not even close.
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A few excerpts from JournoList journalists
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Read Greg Gutfeld: "No Real Surprises From JournoList Race-Baiting."