When contrasting, say, European/UK/Canadian coverage of the climate change scandals (plentiful) with that that in the US ("What scandal?"), or doing the same exercise with the Gulf oil spill (what mainstream US news outlet carried this information, for example?) it's easy to become puzzled as to why the American people are not exposed to many important bits of information. In fact, the blackout on certain bits of data seems to be, in the US, near universal, creating an impression of coordination.
So when something like "Journolist" surfaces -- a private, liberal-only chat group where reporters and pundits discussed breaking stories -- it's likewise easy to wonder if it might have been part of the aforementioned problem. Perhaps, one might speculate, journalists all used it to frame their reporting of stories, and make sure they stayed on the same narrative page?
Not to fear: Jonathan Chait dispels such concerns:
If I hadn't been on Journolist, I probably would have been fascinated with it as well. I'd probably be imputing great powers to it, like the fantastic description weaved by David Frum.... Let me disabuse everybody by revealing that Journolist was not created for people to work out some party line. The discussion was private not because the conversations were too explosive to be made public, but because they were too mundane.
Oh! Of course, that makes complete sense. Very boring and useless information is always the kind you want hidden behind a privacy wall. Which explains why a tremendous scandal arose when even one of those postings was made public. (Exposing Dave Weigel, a supposed libertarian journalist, as actually being a lefty.)
Conversations consisted of requests for references -- does anybody know an expert in such and such...
Rather than going to, say, public sources (libraries, research departments), liberals asked each other to recommend "experts" for the various stories they were covering. What kind of "experts" would such process tend to favor? "Experts" from from the Heritage Foundation? Economists of all political stripe? Academics with a wide variety of views on healthcare reform?
No, no story-shaping here, so far.
... instantaneous reactions to events...
So: one liberal journalist posts his "instantaneous reaction" to each event, and those which were most popular among other (liberal, journalist) readers then rose to the top and were repeated most often. The people who read these narratives then went on to craft national news stories on the events in question.
Okay, no story-shaping there either.
...joshing around, conversations about sports, and the like. Why did this have to be private? Because when you're a professional writer, even in the age of Twitter, you try to maintain some basic standard in your published work. I don't subject my readers to my thoughts on the Super Bowl as of halftime, or even (usually) the meaning of the Pennsylvania special election two minutes after polls close....
Hilarious! While attempting to tell us this forum wasn't used to frame important news stories, Chait can't help but throw in example after example of political stories, such as "the meaning of the Pennsylvania special election two minutes after polls close." Concerns are being dispelled with every sentence!
Not very self-aware, is he?
Why was the group exclusively non-conservative?
Again, I thought he was supposed to be dispelling these kinds of concerns, not confirming them?
I wished it did have some right-wingers, but I went back and forth on this and I can understand the reason it didn't. You wanted to have some discussion of politics that didn't constantly require establishing first principles.
Ah, yes: right wingers would have questioned your most basic economic, social (etc) assumptions. This gets in the way of follow-up discussions about applications. I would imagine so!
.... so you could muse about a vote to extend unemployment benefits without having to refute the notion that Franklin Roosevelt deepened the Great Depression.
Right! If you thought (or even merely contemplated the possibility) that lengthening unemployment benefits might also extend unemployment, that might get in the way of carrying the narrative forward from that initial assumption. Better to leave such assumptions shared and unquestioned, and get on to "musing about" what the vote means, only within that narrow set of economic assumptions.
The notion that the list existed to work out some party line, or to vet ideas before they became articles, is silly. Sometimes people used the list to gather liberal counterarguments to an idea before they wrote it....
Um, again: Chait says he would go to the list to ask for "liberal" views of an issue before it was written. And it wasn't being used to shape the resulting narrative along politically-uniform lines? Again, how little self-awareness can one have? (Mind you, these are the people who are supposed to report on news and the motives of others objectively; if they can't even detect their own gaping blind spots, what on earth are they doing reporting on others'?)
I'm sorry to spoil the excitement. It was a chat group.
Err, I think that was precisely the point, Jonathan.
Well, I feel better now. Don't you?