Patterico's Pontifications

7/21/2010

Is Cabalist the New Journolist?

Filed under: Media Bias — DRJ @ 11:41 am



[Guest post by DRJ]

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, claims Cabalist is the new Journolist:

“Shortly after the Weigel scandal, Klein, the Washington Post’s left-wing policy blogger, shut down Journolist, which was meant to be off-the-record, though why anyone thought a listserv with 400 members, many of whom were professional scribblers, would stay off the record is beyond me. But the idea behind Journolist — a forum in which like-minded opinion-makers could share information and ideas (much of the content of Journolist that I have seen consisted of eye-glazing wonkery) but also, on occasion, plot campaigns against Journolist’s ideological foes — would not die. Hence, the birth of the heretofore secret Cabalist, which unlike Journolist, has only 173 members, rather than 400, but which in other ways resembles Journolist (such as in the propensity of Cabalist members to leak ostensibly private information to non-Cabalist members, including to yours truly).”

Goldberg sees irony in the Cabalist non-response to recent Journolist revelations and while he says he wasn’t a member of either group, he agrees with Andrew Sullivan, who called the Journolist revelations depressing and corrupt.

— DRJ

16 Responses to “Is Cabalist the New Journolist?”

  1. Fish gotta swim, lefties gotta groupthink.

    LukeHandCool (fa3b23)

  2. The best part of the story is pointed out by Rush Limbaugh (Natch).

    Funny thing….a number of my friends sent me the Daily Caller piece and the most shocking thing to them in the story was the advocacy of having government shut down Fox News. That the left wants me dead was not a big deal to them because it was nothing new to them. I think that’s hilarious. And about that: how about the LAW professor who thinks the FCC can pull Fox’s license? Fox does not have a license. The FCC does not grant Fox its right to exist. And this guy teaches law.

    FCC rules on public media, like airwaves. Cable is not licensed by the FCC. How stupid can you be if you are a law professor ?

    Mike K (0ef8c3)

  3. Mike K–I caught that too. Maybe this is some kind of law professor who thinks that the First Amendment and other constitutional protections such as due process are just guidelines, or maybe he thinks that conservatives aren’t entitled to these rights and protections.

    rochf (ae9c58)

  4. This “Cabalist” stuff is parody, right?

    (It’s not always easy to tell where the left are concerned)

    Subotai (f1c28f)

  5. Do editors and publishers not object to reporters and commentators engaging in not-so-secret discussions that directly affect their reporting, and that would embarrass the publication if they came out?

    If that’s too naive, aren’t there legal concerns? Suppose somebody like Ackerman calls someone a racist and gets sued, along with whatever fool he works for, and his emails are presented as evidence of malice and reckless disregard for truth?

    Glen Wishard (2167a4)

  6. When all the talk shows and reporters started talking about “gravitas” one day I figured there was some back room some where they were getting their talking points.

    Now, the economy is in the tank and they all start trying to convince us that o “turned it around.”

    This tells us where that back room is.

    What whores!

    Jim (844377)

  7. 4. This “Cabalist” stuff is parody, right?

    — In their case, self-parody.

    Icy Texan (fdba61)

  8. i have to wonder how well this list will do.

    Look you guys might remember a few months ago I was big on the everyone draw mohammed movement. I am still proud I managed to be banned in Pakistan. And JD created just a beautiful work of art. I didn’t know at the time he was apparently depicted jeff norman rather than mohammed, but oh well…

    Jokes aside, my site wasn’t even close to the biggest. The biggest, hands down, was a facebook page. It was up to over 110K followers before islamofascist hackers tore it down. Then they came back and they announced that they had proven their point, that keeping the site up was a major administrative pain in the butt, and now they were going to shut it down. I won’t assume they were full of it or anything, but who knows.

    After that like about 16 facebook tried to take up the mantle, but they were sadly pathetic shadows of that one.

    Of course that big facebook page was picking up the flag for another facebook page that itself picked up the flag for molly Norris. Molly Norris backed down because, she claimed, it was just a joke. I was convinced she was scared and indeed she has been the subject of fatwahs by that same idiot who inspired the times square bomber. The original facebook page claimed to quite because they were sick of the “hate.” It seems plausible, but then the experience with Norris makes us suspect otherwise.

    Point is this story makes me wonder if cabalist can ever fill that space again, especially given how journalist has been used against different people. as we say in law, email is forever. Seriously a stupid email or net posting is about as easy to kill as Jason from the Friday the 13th movies.

    And besides would you want to be on a list that advertises itself as a cabal? Then again, didn’t nixon’s fixers take the acronym CREEP or something close to that? the lack of self-awareness in some people can astound at times.

    Aaron Worthing (A.W.) (e7d72e)

  9. Cabalist cannot truly take the place of JournoList. The more we see, the more we learn that the J-List was used as a forum for openly left-wing pundits (and Weigel) to explicitly and implictly lobby the lurking members of the center-left establishment press to choke off coverage of stories and outlets, and to spin certain stories for the Democrats. The explict lobbying came from people like Weigel and Hayes. The implicit lobbying is the lunatic ranting that acts as a form of peer pressure to continue manufaturing consent from a center-left perspective. They relied on the off-the-record ground rules to engage in this lobbying w/o fear of being called out in the MSM (which is shunning the DC series like the plague).

    The size of the Cabalist suggests most MSMers are being excluded, either out of fear of leaks, or because some of them now see the danger in joining. The Cabalist will be far less popular as a pure circle jerk, because the MSMers won’t be playing voyeur.

    Karl (f07e38)

  10. I can imagine some of the 173 are saving every single email from Cabalist, just to make sure they don’t miss another Breitbart $100,000 offer.

    Why do these folks need a secret chat room? Are they incapable of independent thought? Seems with DNC Talking points and Media Matters releases they would be in sync. But they need something like this to get their stries straight.

    Rush dissects them every day anyway. Today’s keyword from the DNC was “context” by the way.

    Corky Boyd (d787be)

  11. AW – You only slightly overstated my brilliance.

    KKKarl – Ironic that the JournoList posts are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were doing exactly what Boy Wonder Ezra claimed they were not.

    JD (3399c0)

  12. Do editors and publishers not object to reporters and commentators engaging in not-so-secret discussions that directly affect their reporting, and that would embarrass the publication if they came out?

    Ask this question whenever you meet a big-media editor or publisher — especially if other people are around.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C. O.R. (a18ddc)

  13. Don’t you admire these independent JournoListers?

    ADAM SERWER, AMERICAN PROSPECT: My take.
    SPENCER ACKERMAN: Goddamn, did an Obama speechwriter ghost that post? That’s pitch-perfect, Adam. Take a bow.

    Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C. O.R. (a18ddc)

  14. Andrew Sullivan who called the Journolist revelations depressing and corrupt.

    Old Sully knows both depressing and corrupt personally.

    BT (74cbec)

  15. It could be jealousy on Sully’s part. The Funny thing about Sully, no matter how wild-eyed his conspiracy rantings about Sarah Palin’s uterus gets he will ** never ** be fully accepted into the lefty journalist crowd. Too many old timers with long memories (ie: memories of what Sully was like before 2005) make that impossible. Besides, Sully’s ideological moorings never last more than a couple of years, he’s kind of like a teenage girl in that respect.

    Sean P (4fde41)

  16. J-list wasn’t a revelation, it was just a confirmation. Let there be no more protests about “objective journalism” – as if it ever existed. What is clear is that since Watergate “journalism” has abandoned any allegiance to truth or attempt at objectivity, but has become a means to “effect change” through (coincidentally) implementing the leftist policy preferences of J-school professors who are drawn from the rejects of the English Departments.

    Adjoran (ec6a4b)


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