When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack
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In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.
But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.
The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”
Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”
“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”
Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”
Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.
“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.
Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”
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Seriously. All “objective” and/or “mainstream” media outlets like Time, CNN, etc need to fire these people. They need to go work in their rightful places at the Nation and the New Republic. We need to be insistent about this. These people need to go.
Okay, so, we recognize that journalists are people too, have their own bias and prejudices, their own political viewpoints and philosophies. What bothers me so much about these people is their numbing sense of superiority. That somehow, having access to readers (however smart or otherwise) makes them experts. Journalists come in two flavors: Cheerleaders and Bashers. And they are interchangeable. Forget left-right, liberal or conservative. Most journalists lend themselves to deceit as readily as retreivers take to water. For the most part, the only people in America that retain any respect for the profession are the journalists themselves. They are becoming more and more strident in their desperation to maintain their status in society in the face of more open communication afforded by the WWW. A dying breed and, to my way of thinking, worthy of euthanasia.
The problem, as TC alluded to in his open letter yesterday, is that these people (along with others, I am confident) maliciously, conspiratorially, and unashamedly crossed the once-clear-and-respected line between journalism and editorial opinion … right on into unabashed partisan propaganda.
The fact that only one major news outlet even makes an effort to report more than one side of any given issue is a condemnation of the wretched state of journalism far greater than any argument I could make here. That “progressives” and the overwhelmingly “progressive” media consistently respond to the reporting of anything other than the “progressive” viewpoint with condescension and derision speaks more to their intolerance and incredibly false sense of superiority than to any shortcomings of those they seek to deride and demean.
Is it any wonder that so many of us increasingly hold the “main-stream” media in such contempt?
It would appear that these JournoLister intellectuals have gotten their hands caught in the cookie jar. They themselves have proven that intellect is perhaps not everything it is cracked up to be. Without honesty and morality to fortify it, intellect can easily run amok. BonJOUR NOLISTERS!