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JournoList: Inside the echo chamber

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.”

But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion
say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in
their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin
acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one —
got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister
Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen
discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.

“I’m very lazy about writing when I’m not getting paid,” Alterman
said. “So if I take the trouble to write something in any detail on
the list, I tend to cannibalize it. It doesn’t surprise me when I see
things on the list on people’s blogs.”

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.

But beyond these specific examples, it’s hard to trace JList’s
influence in the media, because so few JListers are willing to talk on
the record about it.

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.”

While members may talk freely about JList at, say, a Columbia Heights
house party, there’s a “Fight Club”-style code of silence when it
comes to discussing it for publication.

But a handful of JList members agreed to talk for this story — if only
to push back against the perception that the group is some sort of
secret, left-wing cabal.

Several members volunteered that JList is unlike listservs such as
Townhouse, the private, activist-oriented group formed by liberal
blogger Matt Stoller.

“No one’s pushing an agenda,” said Toobin.

Toobin joined JList about a year ago, and he said that he had to get a
new e-mail address just for JList in order to keep up with the sheer
volume of commentary that appears there every day. The frequent
disputes among members, he said, are “what’s most entertaining on 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.”

But aren’t there enough forums for arguing about domestic and foreign
policy — or even for partaking in the more idiosyncratic JList debates
about the merits of Bruce Springsteen and whether The New Republic is
liberal enough? And do those debates really have to happen behind a
veil of secrecy?

“It’s sort of a chance to float ideas and kind of toss them around,
back and forth, and determine if they have any value,” said New
Republic associate editor Eve Fairbanks, “and get people’s input on
them before you put them on a blog.”

Indeed, the advantage of JList, members say, is that it provides a
unique forum for getting in touch with historians and policy people
who provide journalists with a knowledge base for articles and blog
posts.

Yglesias, who writes an eponymous blog hosted by the Center for
American Progress, noted that “the combined membership has tentacles
of knowledge that reach everywhere,” adding that “you can toss out a
question about Japan or whatever and get some different points of
view.”

Alterman said it’s important that there are “people with genuine
expertise” on the list.

“For me, it’s enormously useful because I don’t like to spend my time
reading blogs and reading up-to-the-minute political minutia,” he
said. “This list allows me to make sure I’m not missing anything
important.”

POLITICO’s Mike Allen, Ben Smith and Lisa Lerer are on the list. “The
roster includes some of the savviest authorities on everything from
behavioral economics to Ben’s Chili Bowl,” Allen said. “It’s a window
into a world of passionate experts — an hourly graduate education.”

Said another JLister: “I don’t know any other place where working
journalists, policy wonks and academics who write about current
politics and political history routinely communicate with one
another.”

But what if all the private exchanges got leaked?

That’s been the subject of some JList conversation, too, as members
discuss the Weekly Standard’s publication of a 2006 e-mail posted to
the private China Security Listserv by diplomat Charles Freeman, who
last week withdrew his name from consideration for a top intelligence
job.

Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain staffer and conservative blogger who
published the e-mail, was not part of the China list and therefore
hadn’t agreed to any off-the-record rules.

Asked about the existence of conservative listservs, Goldfarb said
they’re much less prevalent.

“There is nothing comparable on the right. E-mail conversations among
bloggers, journalists and experts on our side tend to be ad hoc,”
Goldfarb said. “The JournoList thing always struck me as a little
creepy.”

Kaus, too, has seemed put off by the whole idea, once talking on
BloggingHeads about how the list “seems contrary to the spirit of the
Web.”

“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.

But Time’s Joe Klein, who acknowledged being on JList and several
other listservs, said in an e-mail that “they’re valuable in the way
that candid conversations with colleagues and experts always are.”
Defending the off-the-record rule, Klein said that “candor is
essential and can only be guaranteed by keeping these conversations
private.”

And then Klein — speaking like the JLister he is — said there wasn’t
“anything more that I can or want to say about the subject.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/20086.html

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