Amerika

The media has two allies: its own complicity in simultaneous advancement of a narrative from multiple sources, and the “memory hole” created by a constant barrage of new stories and drama. For this reason, most have already forgotten the JournoList Scandal:

JournoList e-mails obtained by the Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don’t like Republicans and do like Democrats…In 2008, participants shared talking points about how to shape coverage to help Obama. They tried to paint any negative coverage of Obama’s racist and hateful pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as out of bounds. Journalists at such “objective” news organizations as Newsweek, Bloomberg, Time, and The Economist joined conversations with open partisans about the best way to criticize Sarah Palin.

…In the 1930s, the New York Times deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s murders. In 1964, CBS reported that Barry Goldwater was tied up with German Nazis. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers and found that journalists identified themselves as liberal by a factor of 3 to 1. Their actual views on issues were far more liberal than even that would suggest…In other words, JournoList is a symptom, not the disease. And the disease is not a secret conspiracy but something more like the “open conspiracy” H. G. Wells fantasized about, where the smartest, best people at every institution make their progressive vision for the world their top priority.

The scandal here is not their views, but that the perpetually Leftist press was caught coordinating coverage in order to spin a narrative and effectively make their “objective” newspapers, magazines and television shows into propaganda organs.

Under the guise of an article explaining why the list was not collusion but a resource, one of the participants wrote in ultra-Left Slate what amounts to an admission of guilt if one reads between the lines and focuses on terms like “should”:

The “JournoList scandal,” which came a month later, was that the old listserv of several hundred journalists and academics and operatives occasionally indulged in threads about how a story (Jeremiah Wright, Palin’s rise) would hurt Barack Obama and what should be done to fight back.

…The point was that it connected a bunch of people in divergent but related industries, all liberal or left-wing, and gave them space to talk about what they were/should have been working on.

In other words, he fully admits that this list coordinated thinking between different media establishments, and that the list was entirely biased to favor the Left.

To Leftists, this is not a scandal; they believe that egalitarianism (Leftism) is ineffably correct and that anyone who opposes it is bad, so what they “should” be working on is how to smash the opposition.

As we venture into yet another discovery that the American media reports with a Leftist slant, only hires Leftists and fires any non-Leftists that it can, it is important to remember that what we are seeing and hearing is not the product of independent minds coming to the same conclusion, but coordinated attacks where the slant and timing are arranged in advance.

These simultaneous attacks are very effective because they create an echo chamber. Change the channel and see more of the same; pick up a paper instead, or a magazine, and read the same thing at the same time. It creates the impression that all of society agrees on this judgment, when in fact it is a small cabal who work together to create what is effectively a controlled media.

Tags: journolist, media, memory hole, propaganda