More Leaked JournoList Emails

More good stuff. Not great, good. Tasty. Makes me want more.

Looks like we got our first "reporter"! Not just an opinion writer at a liberal magazine; a reporter at Bloomberg:

“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”

Here was a response. This guy is a nothing (so is Donmoyer, actually, but whatevs) but enjoy the full crudity of his response:

Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).”

Then came the denunciations of FoxNews, and the demands it be taken off the airwaves, which it's not actually on, being on cable, not broadcast waves. But such details don't trouble our very smart, very connected JournoListers.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.”

I quote this because of the remark about peer pressure: I think that's critical, and that explains a lot about the media.

When Dave ("Who?") Weigel wanted to bash conservatives about Palin, he asked why we were freaking out over Joe McGinnis invading her privacy, because "any journalist" would jump at that chance.

See, that's the problem Dave: No they wouldn't. How do I know this? Because they haven't. Bill Clinton's a big, important figure to write biographies about; how come no one's renting the apartment across the street from his wink-wink "executive offices" in Harlem and peeking at him to see who visits him?

Same with Hillary. There are a lot of interesting subjects who'd sell a lot of biographies -- and for all of them, the lurid promise of exxxtra special access!!! Spy footage!!! would sell even more copies.

So why, Dave, if this is something "all journalists" would jump to do, do they not... actually... do... it?

It's because you're wrong. Not "all journalists" would do this about their subjects. Not because they don't want to sell more books. But because the peer disapproval from their like-minded liberal colleagues discourages them from spying on Hillary Clinton.

And they do it to Palin because none of them care if Palin's privacy is invaded; in fact, they applaud it. Because she is "The Other." She is inhuman -- and you can treat her worse than an animal.

You know, for the left's constant blather about "The Other" (an idea with merit, I think), they sure the hell are oblivious to their constant Otherizing of others, aren't they? You'd think that people who never shut the fuck up about Otherizing the Otherish Others would once in a while realize, "Hey, you know what? I think I'm indulging in a little Class-A Otherification here myself."

But I digress.

Behold the power of peer pressure. Recently the Washington Post made excuses for itself, as it always does, about its failure to cover The Black Panther story. Oh, it's, like, because we didn't hear of it, or we thought we had it covered, or there was just too much damn news that week.

Bullshit. You would have spiked circulation by 25% that week by covering it, for doing nothing other than doing your jobs.

So why didn't you publish it? Peer disapproval as each of your liberal buddies asks you why you're so racist.

Peer pressure. These bloodless, sweatless, sexless nobodies know nobody but their own pathetic kind, and they're all so career-oriented they have subverted every flash of actual humanity and personality they have to better conform to the herd's expectations. And the herd doesn't like race stories (at least race stories that don't feature the preferred villain Big Whitey), and so they internalize that in what passes for their personalities and they in turn don't like race stories either.

And FoxNews...? Why, they're not amenable to peer pressure! Rogues! They report different things than we do!

There's more to the DC article, of course. Like a producer at NPR having masturbatory fantasies about Rush Limbaugh's death.

posted by Ace at 02:47 AM

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