Where Left-Leaning Pundits and Bloggers Compare Notes

Interesting piece by Michael Calderone on The Politico yesterday, on how liberal commentators compare notes and hone their message, "JournoList: Inside the Echo Chamber". A few brief excerpts follow.

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.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

[...]

Last April, criticism of ABC’s handling of a Democratic presidential debate took shape on JList before morphing into an open letter to the network, signed by more than 40 journalists and academics — many of whom are JList members.

POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests — and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there.

In an e-mail, Klein said he understands that the JList’s off-the-record rule “makes it seems secretive.” But he insisted that JList discussions have to be off the record in order to “ensure that folks feel safe giving off-the-cuff analysis and instant reactions.”

One byproduct of that secrecy: For all its high-profile membership — which includes Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman; staffers from Newsweek, POLITICO, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and The New Yorker; policy wonks, academics and bloggers such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias — JList itself has received almost no attention from the media.

A LexisNexis search for JournoList reveals exactly nothing. Slate’s Mickey Kaus, a nonmember, may be the only professional writer to have referred to it “in print” more than once — albeit dismissively, as the “Klein Klub.”

[...]

“You don’t want to create a whole separate, like, private blog that only the elite bloggers can go into, and then what you present to the public is sort of the propaganda you’ve decided to go public with,” Kaus argued.

The illustration above, by Matt Wuerker, accompanied Calderone's piece on The Politico.

McCain's Base

In the 2000 Republican presidential primary, Senator McCain and his campaign staffers used to joke that "the press is our base". McCain had long had favorable relations with the press, particularly when he bucked his party on various issues, and that continued during his insurgent primary campaign against then-Governor George W. Bush. McCain enjoyed some favorable press during this year's Republican primary as well, but once the general election campaign between McCain and Senator Obama began, McCain's press 'base' largely deserted him. The Pew Research Center study released last week provides some evidence of this (see: "Canvasing Campaign Media: An Analysis of Time, Tone and Topics"; the histogram above comes from this study). According to the Pew study,

In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three-to-one [...]

The Pew Research Center study summary report asks whether media bias has played a role in this negative coverage,

One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise?

Maybe not, says Pew:

The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.

Many conservatives have long complained that since most journalists tend to be Democrats, the mainstream media is inherently biased against conservatives (although they are sometimes more tolerant of liberal Republicans). This week the Washington Post Company's online magazine Slate was open enough to publish a piece detailing who its staff members and contributors were supporting in the upcoming presidential election. The results won't do anything to assuage conservative complaints of media bias: 55 Slate staff members and contributors are supporting Obama, versus 1 (Deputy Managing Editor and Copy Chief Rachel Larimore, who hopefully doesn't have to eat lunch by herself) supporting McCain (you can read their explanations of their votes here, "How we're voting: Obama wins Slate in a landslide").