JournoList hit number two from the Daily Caller gives us this far-from-shocking revelation: JournoListers hate Fox News. Highlights below. The Daily Caller has also published a handful of excerpts from the JournoList, many of which have been redacted.
One major takeaway from the JournoList so far is that it seems to include admittedly liberal/left opinion writers along with supposedly unbiased journalists and professors. Incredibly, the left blogosphere has and will continue to use this fact to defend anti-right plotting amongst the JournoListers since many of those on the list make a living giving their opinions. This is an attempt to excuse those opinion writers for attempting to corrupt unbiased reporters and educators; it’s also an attempt to excuse unbiased reporters and educators who indulge these corrupting influences. Besides, when you have people like White House correspondent for TIME Michael Scherer contributing to the DIE FOX DIE! discussion, it’s remarkable anyone is still attempting to defend the JournoList.
Though the fact that this even needs to be explained is upsetting, it’s yet another reminder that journalism is long dead and now it needs to be replaced.
The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.
“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.
“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”
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.”