JournoList, Shame of a Nation: Politico & Roger Simon Have Some 'Splaining to Do

You say MSM, I say Politico. You say corrupt, I say Politico.

Today, Politico’s Roger Simon was kind enough to almost scold JournoList for its lasting effect on his precious little profession of journalism. At one point, he and the scrupulously non-partisan Chuck “Fire Glenn Beck” Todd hold hands and commiserate over how this unfortunate JounoList thing is tarring “those of us who don’t practice activist journalism.” If Roger Simon wants to rebuild his precious little profession’s reputation, a good start might be asking his very own publisher some tough questions.

Politico might be an online publication, a part of the New Media, but when it comes to corrupted, left-wing arrogance they make the Washington Post look somewhat honest … somewhat. Part of the reason I reserve a special place in my heart to store up a unique resentment for all things Politico is due to the very fact that they practice their dark arts online. Like a toxic virus they spread over to the Internet where the right (by design) and the left (by accident) are trying to forever kill off the very thing Politico is — wolfish left-wing propagandists hidden in the sheeps’ clothing of “journalism.”

And yet these are the same bastards “journalists” who launched a smear attack on a private citizen for asking Their One a perfectly reasonable question, obsessed over Sarah Palin’s wardrobe (and yet ranked Obama being asked about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers as a 2008 top-ten “media blunder“), and though they occasionally find Levi Johnston worthy of note, Department of Justice whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, remained a ghost up until and including Ben Smith’s factually challenged Nothing-To-See-Here gift to his embattled president.

Oh, and did you know that some of Politico’s “journalists” were members of Ezra Klein’s now infamous JournoList, including Mike Allen, Lisa Lerer, and Mr. Ben “I-Got-Yer-Back-Barack” Smith?

And this little juicy nugget of fact raises a troubling question…

What Politico needs to disclose is exactly when their three employees joined JournoList, because now that we know what really was going on there, this Politico article reeks of a cover up.

Written by Michael Calderon in March of 2009 and titled “JournoList: Inside the echo chamber,” even at the time it was written, the thousand-plus worder ranked as another classic example of what Politico does best: write stories about why stories they don’t want covered aren’t worth covering. In other words, like Ben Smith’s Black Panther piece, this is how Politico spikes that which might damage the Leftist narrative.

While reading Calderon’s JournoList expose,’ you can practically hear the staged, self conscious yawn of a man trying to put across the false front that once again those crazy, paranoid right-wing conspiracy mongers have taken him away from oh-so important work to address this nothing-ness.

Calderon’s idea of “journalism” was to interview JournoList members such as Jeffrey Toobin, Eric Alterman,and Joe Klein, who each assure us in their own wrist-flicking way, Tell those silly right-wingers that no one’s pushing an agenda. In 2009 the piece was hilariously obvious in its biased and preordained objective to smoke-and-mirror away concerns about what Ezra’s little coven of left-wingers was up to. But reading it again in hindsight, it stinks to high heaven.

Deep, deep, deep in the article — long after the dull dutifulness of it all is supposed to kill your interest in clicking over to page two, Calderon finally gets around to admitting Politico’s Smith, Allen, and Lerer are members.

And herein lies Politico’s problem.

Now that it’s become crystal clear that at times JournoList was in fact a hotbed for left-wing ideologues to collude over how to kill stories that might hurt Obama, smear innocent conservatives as racist, coordinate lines of attack against Palin, and work directly with the Obama campaign, the question becomes:

What did Politico know and when did it know it?

Three Politico employees were members of JournoList, and yet in March of 2009, Politico published an article where JournoList members claimed nothing improper was going on there — which we now know wasn’t even close to the truth.

There’s only two explanations: Either Smith, Allen and Lerer weren’t JournoList members when this corrupt activity was taking place, or they were, and not only did they not disclose the improper activity but they allowed their employer to print a misleading story.

What did Politico know and when did it know it?