Guess what, the little cabal of journalists is being broken up.

This is frightening news to most of those in the activist old media, but for somebody like myself who has worked in that media for 30 years, I welcome the breath of fresh air that it brings.

Leftists love the word, “progressive” unless the progress hurts them (for the record, I cringe whenever somebody on the right uses the word “progressive” to describe the left because there is nothing progressive about their policies.)

You’d have to be blind (which many in the activist old media are) to not see this coming and to not see the far-reaching effect that this will have on the business, but agenda is more important than ratings.

It really hurts the fragile ego of somebody with a half dozen Emmys on their desk to get their butt kicked on a story by some blogger laying in bed in his/her pajamas. Ask Dan Rather. (more…)

Leave it to Andrew Sullivan.  It’s been 24 hours since I offered $100,000 for the full list and contents of the Ezra Klein’s four-year experiment in political-journalist editorial collusion — the on line progressive jazz fusion station known as JournoList.  A natural free for all of death-wishing upon their political enemies and other such innocuous scribblings.

It took 24 hours for Sullivan to proclaim that all the rules now were broken.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

In fact, when one of the progressives on this list outed Dave Weigel, the actual rules were broken.  That leaker who destroyed Weigel’s career had agreed to the off-the-record nature of the 400-strong list; the minute the leaker went public with the material the story was no longer about Weigel but about the JournoList itself. (more…)

Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I feel compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference: (more…)

Just a couple of hours ago, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs issued an update to his post “James O’Keefe’s Race Problems” of February 3rd,  which had spread the lie that James O’Keefe attended a “white nationalist convention” (Johnson diligently sourced this characterization of the “Race and Conservatism” debate to the website, One People’s Project).  To his credit, Johnson demands in his update that One People’s Project put up an uncropped picutre of O’Keefe “manning a table of racist literature” or shut up:

More importantly, it’s now incumbent on One People’s Project to put up the goods if they have them. They should release an uncropped version of the picture they said shows O’Keefe manning a table of racist literature, or they should retract that claim because they can’t prove it.

But earlier in the post, Mr. Johnson declares that it was incorrect for Dave Weigel to attribute the phrase “white nationalist conference” to him:

True, Mr. Johnson, but these are also your exact words:

While it is true Mr. Johnson did not use the precise phrase “white nationalist convention” as was noted in Weigel’s article, he said something very similar in the comments of his blog. In this case, Mr. Johnson does not attribute his claim that O’Keefe attended a “meeting of white nationalists” to anyone. (more…)