(PJ Media) I’m old enough to remember the hubbub over JournoList, a listserv of leftist reporters from different news outlets who convened regularly in a chatroom to strategize how to spin stories and set narratives, such as how to torpedo Gov.Sarah Palin to get Barack Obama elected president. From 2007 to 2010, JournoList was its own echo chamber, as Politico put it at the time. Now the same thing’s happening again, with TV lawyers acting as rhetorical wetwork teams covering the trials of their political nemesis, Donald Trump.
JournoList was started by Ezra Klein, who now works for the New York Times, with his other JList pal, Matt Yglesias.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was writing for The Nation when he joined JournoList. Politico reported at the time that the list was a who’s who of leftism. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and “staffers from Newsweek, POLITICO, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New Yorker; policy wonks, academics and bloggers such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias” were all on the listserv, setting the narrative for the rest of the news media, academia, and think tanks.
No conservatives needed apply.
And you thought NPR was bad.
In 2010, when JournoList was allegedly disbanded, PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll summed up the purpose and power of the listserv by positing a question for Republicans:
You can’t stop people from meeting together — that’s un-American — but you can remind them that this is not journalism or a public service; it’s a conspiracy.
And here we go again.
Politico, to its credit, once again outs the cabal. It works like this:
Leading the legal group is Obama Administration lawyer and former Trump impeachment attorney, Democrat Norm Eisen. He works as one of CNN’s legal analysts now. Among the people who have joined this weekly Zoom meeting are Laurence Tribe, the once sane law professor; George Conway, the Lincoln Project OG; and John Dean, the man who set up Richard Nixon and is widely believed by investigative reporters to have green-lighted one of the Watergate break-ins.
