Purple People Vote

Politico reports in their article, JournoList: Inside the echo chamber about this listserv for media members.

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

List participants are quite secretive about the list, as many didn’t not want to acknowlege their membership or discuss the list at all. Yet membership does include Jeffery Toobin of CNN, and journalists from Newsweek and Politico along with many others. One participant’s description of the list…

John Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, described JList in an e-mail as “a virtual coffeehouse” where participants get a chance to talk and argue.

“There is probably general agreement on the stupidity of today’s GOP,” he said. “But beyond that, I would say there is wide disagreement on trade, Israel, how exactly we got into this recession/depression and how to get out of it, the brilliance of various punk bands that I have never heard of, and on whether, at any given moment, the Obama administration is doing the right thing.” 

For anyone who followed the 2008 election, the existance of this list makes so much sense. The media thinks as one left leaning block. As described by John Judis there may have been slight variations in policy opinion, but there was a clear general consensus of the ‘GOP’s stupidity’.

Media credibility is at an all time low, and knowlege of this sort of group-think apparatus provides more light on why newspapers are failing, and news organizations struggle to remain profitable and relevant. While some see this list as a reason to see a media conspiracy, the more basic problem is that journalists are willingly choosing sides and participate in a forum that by definition can not help but spread a monolithic leftist media filter for its members who then file reports, fake objectivity and mislead the public.