Anyone remember JournoList? The list-serv founded by Ezra Klein which included liberal bloggers, liberal media writers and certain Obama officials, where leaked emails from the group showed coordinated attacks and message collusion favoring Barack Obama? The group was dismantled after The Daily Caller produced email after email showing the collusion between the group's messaging then the media's copying of said messaging.Old news? Not so much. The name of the group might have changed but the players are still the same. Keep the names below in mind as you read the quoted excerpts of the DC piece.
Ben Smith- Former member of JournoList.
Greg Sargent- Former member of JournoList.
Sam Stein- Former member of JournoList.
Nico Pitney- Former member of Journolist.
More identified members of JournoList found HERE.
The Daily Caller has a multi-paged detailed article by Tucker Carlson, Vince Coglianese, Alex Pappas and Will Rahn, showing the same type of media coordination with liberal bloggers and liberal mainsteam media along with White House representatives, and Media Matters.
From Page #3
“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”
“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.
Reached by phone, Sargent declined to comment.
“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”
“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”
“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”
If Media Matters cannot get a reporter to follow the progressive script, they bully them:
Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
Then The Daily Caller shows the White House collusion, pages #3 and #4:
A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it’s no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president’s closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.
It’s not clear what the four spoke about — no one in the meeting returned repeated calls for comment — but the apparent coordination continued. “Anita Dunn became a regular presence at the office,” says someone who worked there. Then-president of Media Matters, Eric Burns, “lunched with her, met with her and chatted with her frequently on any number of matters.”
Media Matters also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.
Every Tuesday evening, meanwhile, a representative from Media Matters attends the Common Purpose Project meeting at the Capitol Hilton on 16th Street in Washington, where dozens of progressive organizations formulate strategy, often with a representative from the Obama White House.
In the past several years, Media Matters has focused much of its considerable energy on the Fox News Channel. The network, declares one internal memo, “is the de facto leader of the GOP and it is long past time that it was treated as such by the media, elected officials, and the public.” At the end of September 2009, Burns made the case publicly in an interview on MSNBC.
Fox, he said, “is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda.”
Less than a month later, in language that could have been copied directly from a Media Matters press release, White House communications director Anita Dunn leveled almost precisely the same charge, dismissing Fox as “more a wing of the Republican Party.”
The source had no direct knowledge of the message collusion between the official White House statements and the Media Matters meetings, but that make the coordination of messaging quite the coincidence wouldn't it?
Read the entire six page piece, it is quite enlightening.
Is it any wonder that 60 percent of the American public sees media bias and 47 percent say it is a liberal bias with only 13 percent saying they see a conservative bias? (Source- Gallup)
At least the American people are not being fooled into believing the liberal media, Media Matters and White coordinated messaging.
Kudos once again to The Daily Caller for ripping the roof off of hell and exposing the liberal so-called journolists playing inside.
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