The Daily Caller is currently running a series of articles proving the collusion we’ve long suspected among members of the media. The articles expose the thoughts of some of the liberal writers that belonged to JournoList, a now-defunct listserv of hundreds of left wing journalists, educators, and pundits, in relation to revelations about then-candidate Obama’s relationship to his pastor Jeremiah Wright, John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and other weighty matters.

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList member

As you may suspect, it seems that every blogger on the center-right has an opinion about the revelation—for most Americans, actually just a confirmation—of the naked collusion among journalists in support of left-wing Democratic politics, politicians, and policy.

But this collusion is more than just an example of media corruption. It is an example of these journalists and pundits using their positions, accumulated credibility, and power to thwart the freedom of speech from the inside. Allow yourself just a few minutes to consider the ramifications of this surrender of ethics and their demand for conformity, and you will be terrified. (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…)