...To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too....Well, the JournoListers certainly have the bitchiness down pat. Fantasizing about having a hearty laugh while watching someone die a painful death or fixating on slamming people into plate glass qualifies as an unhealthy merging of bitchiness and mental illness, but where's the cleverness? I thought these were supposed to be the smart kids. Its not only disappointing but anti-climatic.
...That assurance won’t stop the attacks, of course. So why don’t we publish whatever portions of the Journolist archive we have and end the debate? Because a lot of them have no obvious news value, for one thing. Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually. So while it might be amusing to air threads theorizing about the personal and sexual shortcomings of various New Republic staffers, we’ve decided to pull back....
I guess I gave the kids too much credit. In any case, I'm more sure than ever that I am on the right team.
No comments:
Post a Comment