Journolist As Bullying

I’ve written twice about the Journolist scandal in the last few days, but this will probably be the last.  The daily drip-drip-drip of exposures from the conservative Daily Caller is swiftly degenerating into farce, with dark implications put on material that really seems fairly benign.  And as the Atlantic‘s James Fallows points out, Journolist was just a mailing list, with all the typical problems that medium has.  I know that in the partisan interwebz admitting error is risky, but I was wrong to engage in hyperbole by saying  Journolist was a major scandal or threat to democracy.  The major outcome, as Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy notes, was only to undermine their own credibility.

That doesn’t mean Journolist was totally harmless, though.  What I mean here is that Journolist was a symptom, not a sickness in itself.  The problem with Journolist was in its formation, not its execution.  The express goal of Journolist was to put together a group of people who were all good liberals and keep out those bad conservatives so “we” (The Good Liberals Club) could talk bad about them.  It was basically an exercise in elementary-school “club” politics — the “cool kids” get together in a group for the sole purpose of declaring themselves the “cool kids” and hating on the “dorks”.  It had all the marks of a pre-teen club, including the secrecy oath.

In elementary school as here that is relatively harmless except to the degree that it links in with bullying.  In elementary school, the “cool kids” clubs sometimes turn into little attack gangs, verbally and eventually physically attacking the “dorks”.  In the case of Journolist, this tendency flowered with incidents like Spencer Ackerman’s suggestion that liberals deliberately use false accusations of racism against conservatives as a political tactic and the suggestion of a UCLA law professor that the government shut down FoxNews.  While few signed on to such shocking proposals, the few objections were more tactical than ethical.  It wasn’t that they objected to bullying itself, they just wanted more effective forms of bullying.  And the end of Journolist has hardly spelled the end of such methods.

Thus, Journolist isn’t the problem.  Bullying is the problem.  And as the traditional media continues to fall under the control of the opinion-centered “new media” of blogging, the problem can grow.  For the most part, blogs are already separated into hostile camps, dedicated to attacking each other and honoring few rules.  (Rick Moran critiques this as evidence of “epistemic closure” on both sides — and the fact that each side tends to only talk about “epistemic closure” on the other side is evidence of precisely Moran”s point.) Very few blogs even try to maintain any commitment to diverse opinions, like The Moderate Voice does.  And even on The Moderate Voice, it can apparently sometimes be hard to avoid the tendency towards dividing into implacably hostile groups, dedicated only to bashing the other side, calling names, and attacking motives instead of ideas.

But occasionally, we can at least take a moment to remind ourselves to try.  And the pathetic debacle that was Journolist can serve as a reminder.