Posts Tagged ‘ezra klein’

Ezra Klein on Morning Joe…

Posted: July 26, 2010 by datechguy in media
Tags: , ,

…so far not a word concerning journolist, or the daily caller stuff yet. We are at 8:10 and nothing yet.

8:15 Still nothing.

8:20 We’re into commercial, absolutely no mention. Cripes were these guys on vacation with Bob Schieffer?

8:23 Still no Journolist. I’m betting on a single CYA question just before he leaves so he can give an unchallenged response. Will I be wrong?

8:30 He appears to be gone, not even the CYA question. If they’re not ashamed they ought to be. They had better waive the not having 2 Fitchburg guys (Mike Barnicle) working for them and hire me posthaste. That would give them at least one person in favor of the war and one person willing to ask Ezra Klein the journolist question. Hey I’ll can blog for you from home 5 days a week for $20 an hour, it’s a bargain!

Update: How is it possible that people who actually get paid to do journalism could actually do this? How can people who claim to ask the tough question let this go? It’s an offense against their professional honor. This is why I say that the real offense of media bias is the ability to decide what stories are stories. Morning Joe decided that their audience didn’t need to hear about this, so they will not.

Joe, Mika, Barnicle, you guys are better than this.

Update Instalanche: Welcome all. Some other morning joe tidbits from today here and here, check out my latest examiner column here, an interesting take on the OK governer’s race at the Lonely Conservative here, the Senate race in Del at The Other McCain here and if you like Doctor. Who check out my reviews all the Series 5 episodes, start here and just keep clicking.

Brietbart understands how the game works better than anyone

Posted: June 29, 2010 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
Tags: , , , , ,

The Weigel stuff had very little to do with Brietbart but he managed to draw aces.

First he gets Weigel to put his side out on this site:

But I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean. Yes, I’d trash-talk liberals to Republicans sometimes. And I’d tell them which liberals “mattered,” who was a hack, who was coming after them. Did I suggest which strategies might and might not work for liberals, Democrats, and the president? Yes, although I do the same to conservatives — in February, for example, I told many of them that Scott Brown’s election hadn’t killed health care reform, and they needed to avoid dancing in the endzone, because I was aware of what liberals were saying about how to come back.

That impressed the hell out of Stacy McCain who interviewed him for the Spectator:

Especially after the 2004 election, Breitbart said, liberals realized they had “lost control of the narrative,” and began organizing projects aimed at preventing stories that hurt Democrats from gaining traction in mainstream media. Breitbart compared the Journolist “cabal” to Professor Peter Dreier’s “Cry Wolf” project that offered $1,000 fees to academics for papers pushing back against conservative policy proposals.

By exerting peer pressure within the press corps, Breitbart said, the participants in Journolist influenced reporters like Weigel to adopt their practice of treating Drudge and Limbaugh as enemies, and to suppress story angles that favored conservatives.

So Breitbart takes the blog story of the day and makes it the place where everyone HAS to go. Is he done? Not by a long shot. He follows up with the offer that can’t be accepted or can’t be refused but sure can’t be ignored:

The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised.

We want the list of journalists that comprised the 400 members of the “JournoList” and we want the contents of the listserv. Why should Weigel be the only person exposed and humiliated?

I therefore offer the sum of $100,000 to the person who provides the full “JournoList” archive. We will protect that person’s privacy and identity forever. No one will ever know who became $100,000 richer – and did the right thing, morally and ethically — by shining the light of truth on this seamy underworld of the media.

Glenn Reynolds like McCain calls him a Genius. He’s right.

On the memeorandum thread the reactions are varied Johnson calls him unethical, Vanity Fair says it not possible, other pooh pooh it but Breitbart is in a no lose situation.

If someone comes forward with the items he holds a scoop and a half, but the person in question is marked for life. Breitbart will keep his name quiet but the 100,000 has to be paid somehow. Do we get 12 under 10k payments to circumvent federal reporting laws. Said 100k will have to be claimed as an expense of Brietbart and as income by the recipient. I’ll wager a half decent reporter could trace it, particularly since many would be motivated to do so.

What is more likely is that the stupid thing will be done and the list will be held onto. Breitbart gets a storyline he can come back to forever, gets 100k+ worth of publicity without spending any money and can continue to paint journolist as what he says it is. Oh the left denies it, but can’t refute it without producing the actual archives and there’s the rub.

If Breitbart is right about what was going on there (and I suspect he is) then they don’t dare release it it’s a nail in the coffin of everyone who was part of it. If Breitbart is wrong the only way they can do so is to release it but the left is not about thinking long term, the one day or maybe two story the list would produce is one or two days too many for the left and even if the left isn’t doing what was said there is likely to be at least a few more people who have said things that they really shouldn’t have. They will fight tooth and nail to cover themselves.

What is the smart thing? Klein should release the list himself. If Breitbart is wrong it proves it and becomes a one or two day story. He can even give the dough to the DNC if he wants. If Breitbart is right he should release it anyway, we of the right already distrust them, so the revelations are not going to change things much. The damage to the left is then focused during a time when the left is in trouble anyways.

As I’ve said before it is going to come out sooner or later, if the left has brains it will be sooner, but they are not as smart as Breitbart.

Jim Geraghty is close..

Posted: June 25, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , , , ,

in this story but no cigar.

Somebody on Journo-List didn’t like Dave Weigel and decided to publish his most furious and incendiary remarks that he thought — unwisely — that he was expressing in confidence.

this jibes with Stacy’s remarks about Washington:

Anyone who has ever worked in DC can testify that in Washington, the more you succeed, the more knives will be aimed at your back.

Geraghty continues:

So what else is on there that, if revealed, could make life difficult for Ezra Klein or Jeffrey Toobin or Paul Krugman or Ben Smith or Mike Allen? Or is the idea that as long as they stay in line, they’ll never have some remark they regret publicized to the world? Did Journo-List evolve into a massive blackmail scheme that ensures no one inside the club will ever speak ill of another member?

This is where he is wrong. There is nothing Ben Smith, Mike Allen, Ezra Klien, Jeffrey Toobin or Paul Krugman could say about conservatives that would get them in trouble. In fact it would only endear them to their customer base. That is why such revelations would never harm them, but for Dave they proved fatal. Why? Remember what I said this morning:

I see no reason why we should give him more consideration than any other journalist. If he gives us a fair shake then we should act accordingly, if not then not.

Unfortunately his job depends on us giving him more consideration than we would give another journalist. It depends on us not considering him a foe. Ann Althouse explains the issue:

So David started letting his need for lefty approval express itself on the email list, the Journolist, where the cool kids were being intimate and snarky. But those other kids were not tasked with covering conservatives. While they might have been embarrassed if the mean things they wrote in the email were ever leaked, they didn’t have careers founded on their suitability for covering conservatives. The risk poor Dave took was of an entirely different nature. Why, Dave, why? Why did you risk the plum job?

Why? Because he trusted his “friends” on the left.

And memeorandum has gone wild on the subject. The Funniest is Ezra Klein:

It was ironic, in a way, that it would be the Daily Caller that published e-mails from Journolist. A few weeks ago, its editor, Tucker Carlson, asked if he could join the list. After asking other members, I said no, that the rules had worked so far to protect people, and the members weren’t comfortable changing them. He tried to change my mind, and I offered, instead, to partner with Carlson to start a bipartisan list serv. That didn’t interest him.

In any case, Journolist is done now. I’ll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That’s not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I’m proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will re-form it, with many of the same members, and keep it going. Hopefully, it will lose some of its mystique in the process, and be understood more for what it is: One of many e-mail lists where people talk about things they’re interested in. But insofar as the current version of Journolist has seen its archives become a weapon, and insofar as people’s careers are now at stake, it has to die.

Or in other words , “God forbid the public see what was really said by us.” Kind of funny for people whose job it is to get to get people to share with them.

Klein would doubtless say we are being paranoid about what Journolist actually was. It seems to be that he is asking for a consideration that the people on the left that he allowed on “journolist” doesn’t give to the right or the government when republicans are in power.

I also like the implication that Carlson got what he was trying to get. You had better hope that wasn’t what Tucker was after because if it was then he would have already downloaded the lot and is sitting on it. Perhaps Breitbart has it right now and is simply editing with video now to be released to its best effect.

Sooner or later it is all going to come out so, assuming I am wrong about the damage it would cause to your friends. you might as well get it out now, because if we conservatives DO have the content you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be released at a time of our best advantage. After all the left is going to be stuck by disaster this election anyways, might as well get the disaster out of the way when it can cause the least overall damage.

But I don’t think that’s what happened, I think a “friend” of his was pissed over something and decided to nail him, but you never know Ezra I might be wrong, maybe you should release the archives now.

Newer Entries