The JournoList: How Journalists Conspire to Push an Agenda
KEEP IN MIND - These private groups are only HUNDREDS of people out of the probably hundreds of thousands of Journalists in the US (32k full time, then freelance and part time) It is not to say ALL journalists are bad or that journalism is bad.Journalists have been caught conspiring to push political agendas in the past. Today we look at the "journolist" the "cabalist" and new evidence that the group of left wing journalists, intellectuals, and academics may have never actually disbanded at all.Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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Then there are journalists who are just too lazy or inept to actually do the work, and thus they put out stories that are factually incorrect and misleading.
But there's also a group of journalists and academics and people on the far left who talk to each other on forums online and conspire to push certain political narratives.
It's not a conspiracy, this is actually true, and it was uncovered nearly eight years ago.
So today, we're going to explore some of the issues of how journalists manipulate the narrative by conspiring with each other.
And we're only going to be able to just touch the surface of this.
So I hope you're ready to dive into the rabbit hole and look at some contemporary issues as well as some of the issues that took place nearly 10 years ago.
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The story I'm about to bring up warrants a much larger documentary, but what I'm going to do is lead you to the water, and it's your choice if you're going to drink.
This is the story of the Journalist.
The Journalist, or J-List, was a private Google Groups forum for discussing politics and the news media, with 400 left-leaning journalists, academics, and others.
Ezra Klein created the online forum in February 2007, while blogging at the American Prospect, and shut it down on June 25, 2008, amid wider public exposure.
Journalists later pointed out various off-color statements made by members of a list denigrating conservatives, as well as a seeming conspiracy to prop up then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Others defended such statements as being taken out of context or simply a matter of private candor.
In an article from the Wall Street Journal titled, quote, The Wall Street Journal has this quote, and it says, Most damning is a long quote from Spencer Ackerman, who worked for something called the Washington Independent.
In his quote, he says, What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of
going after the left.
In other words, find a right-wingers and smash it through a plate glass window.
Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear, obviously.
I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle.
If the right forces us to either defend right or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us.
Instead, take one of them.
This is just one example of a journalist behind closed doors arguing for falsely calling someone racist so they can win political points.
such deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country.
What lurks behind those problems, this makes them sputter with rage, which in turn leads
to overreaction and self-destruction.
This is just one example of a journalist behind closed doors arguing for falsely calling someone
racist so they can win political points.
But the story actually gets much creepier.
According to the Journalist Wikipedia, there was something called the Cabal List spin-off.
After Klein shut down Journalist, a new group calling itself CabalList was started by Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic, Michelle Goldberg, and Stephen Telles.
A professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
The group, which had 173 members by late July, was made up of mostly former journalist members.
Its existence managed to stay secret for several weeks, until the Atlantic Magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg revealed its existence in a blog post on July 21st.
Goldberg reported that one recent discussion concerned whether or not members should ignore the articles on the Daily Caller website.
In other words, Members of Journalist 2.0 were debating whether to collectively respond to a Daily Caller story, alleging, inaccurately in their minds, that members of Journalist 1, the same people of course, made collective decisions about what to write.
This group actually referred to themselves as a cabal.
It included professors and journalists.
These conversations span newsrooms and universities.
So when you have a narrative emerging, say that Gamergate was a harassment campaign, but these journalists behind the scenes are all hanging out with each other, sharing the same ideas and expressing the same opinions, of course all of these news outlets are probably going to put out similar narratives that Gamergate was simply intending on harassing women.
That is not true.
And while it is true that there are many people who do harass women online, probably within GamerGate as well, GamerGate has a clear agenda to call out the politicization and unethical behavior of games journalism.
That's a fact.
Many people in media still believe that it is simply about harassing women.
That's not true.
By all means, you can say GamerGate had people who were harassing women.
That's fine.
And I'm sure many people did.
And I'm sure it's probably a big problem that people who are associated with Gamergate need to deal with.
But the reality is, you can't take the worst offenders and act like that is the entire movement, because certainly people who are activists in the space do have a mission in terms of some kind of political goal.
The point of this is that these lists exist.
That people behind the scenes make decisions about what is or isn't and what should be.
Whether or not they believe they're shaping the discourse is irrelevant.
There is a private group of left-leaning individuals and academics who are sharing ideas and agreeing or disagreeing on what they should or should not write.
Thus, we don't have multiple different news agencies.
We have many different news agencies who are connected by a single thread throughout all of these newsrooms.
Many of these people come from similar backgrounds and they share similar ideas, in which case these people will push an agenda whether they think they are or not.
Now you can argue whether or not that should be allowed or shouldn't be.
On one side you can say that, look, it's just the people who are like-minded sharing space and this is what happens.
From another side, you could say that they should separate themselves because we need a diversity of thought when it comes to the political landscape.
But all of that gets pushed aside when we learn the journalist, the cabal, never went away.
It still exists today, and the narrative is still being pushed.
This story from Jezebel is actually really interesting.
This is from June 27th, and it's titled, Private Messages Reveal the CIS Journalist Groupthink Behind Trans Media Narratives.
What's interesting is that this story is mostly about how journalists in a group discuss trans issues, and they take issue with it.
But in my opinion, the bigger news comes in the middle of the story, kind of a buried lead.
In the story, they say that Single posted these messages in a discussion forum of a closed listserv he belongs to, hosted on Google Groups.
That's exactly where the original journal list was.
The Listserv, per its About page, aims to provide an off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics, and wonks.
It has been around for at least eight years.
I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010.
And has just over 400 members.
403 at the time of this writing.
These members include New York Times best-selling authors, Ivy League academics, magazine editors, and other public intellectuals.
In short, a lot of important people who influence public discourse through their written work.
They use the listserv's forum to discuss current events, news from their respective fields, articles they've read, articles they've written, and other topics of public importance.
There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties.
Whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women's prison, Janet Mock's contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan, and the Twitter mob she inspired.
Eleanor Burkett's New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood,
comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, erasure of the word vagina saying pregnant people versus
pregnant women, and a number of Jessie Singles articles over the past few
years.
This story goes into great detail about the trans issue, but they bring up something really important.
The Journal List was dissolved in 2010.
It existed in Google Groups and had around 400 members.
Now we're hearing that around 2010, another group emerged, now with about 400 members, to serve a similar purpose, with left-of-center journalists, academics, and public influencers.
Essentially, what some people really did refer to as the cabal still exists.
And I'll say it again.
Many of these people might not realize why this is unethical and why it is a problem.
But in my opinion, it really is.
Because these people are all going to put themselves in a bubble where they believe the same thing.
And this will span various news media companies.
And then Wikipedia will pick up these stories, all running a similar narrative that was developed by one group of people, or by people influenced by this very influential group, and then Wikipedia will then assert it as fact.
There is a lot more about this.
It gets way deeper, there are some pretty damning quotes, and I can't get into all of it.
Suffice it to say, there is a group of people who are on the left who coordinate online, share ideas, and are influential.
And this does infect many different news organizations.
Whether or not you think that's good or bad is entirely up to you.
But this story warrants further investigating.
So stay tuned, because maybe I'll have something else for you in the near future.
But we'll see what happens.
In the meantime, you can comment below and let me know what you think about all of this.
Let me know what you think about issues like Gamergate, social justice, the culture war.
What do you think about The Journalist?
Could this just be a conspiracy theory?
I mean, we know the list existed.
Is it possible today's list that we're hearing about from Jezebel is just the remnants of the original group?
And is it possible that those who called themselves the Cabal are still a part of this same group?
