Journolist Exposes Authoritarian Impulses
The Daily Caller has the long-awaited archives of the former liberal treehouse clique known as Journolist. The drip-drip of daily exposures from the archives illuminates some troubling attitudes. Today’s installment highlights a debate about whether or not it is justifiable to use the power of government to limit the access of non-liberal news outlets like FoxNews. While I disagree with the Daily Caller‘s hyperbolic interpretation of the comments of a UCLA law professor, the brushing aside of moral and ethical concerns by a New Republic senior editor reflects a dangerous attitude:
Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”
But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”
Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”
John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship. “Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”
Early concerns about Journolist centered on the hypocrisy of the clique. A group of journalists from outlets that put themselves forward as the objective and reliable mainstream and claiming to be in contrast to the partisanship of FoxNews exposed themselves in private as liars and hypocrites, openly plotting the best ways to promote liberal politics and attack conservatives by using their positions in the “objective” media.
All that hypocrisy is really just “gotcha” though. After several decades of journalists voting for Democrats at rates above 90% and repeated scandals like “RatherGate” where “mainstream” and “objective” journalists pursuing obviously partisan agendas, very few people who weren’t hard-core liberal partisans themselves even bothered to question the obvious conclusion that there was an overall liberal bias in the media. This latest exposure, however, is beyond inter-partisan inside baseball. The use of government power to favor one party over another threatens the foundations of democracy. Endorsing it as “only tactical” exposes a serious problem with authoritarianism running in at least some liberal circles.
In a time where any wacko racist who shows up at a Tea Party rally supposedly raises a duty to disclaim among every other Tea Party leader, member, and associate, liberal reporters and bloggers surely have an equal duty to disclaim the authoritarian fantasies exposed from Journolist. In this area, silence may really indicate consent.
