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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Enlighten Us, Ezra, Release All The Emails

Ezra Klein, who organized the Journolist and now blogs at The Washington Post, declares that the expose by The Daily Caller has descended from tragedy into farce.

The proof? Klein feels that The Daily Caller is not disclosing enough of the e-mails, which Klein feels would vindicate Klein and others, and prove there was no grand conspiracy.

Klein writes today:
Which brings us to the Daily Caller. There might be some interesting stories to write about a trove of 25,000+ e-mails -- though, in reality, most of them would say something like "lots of people have lots of different opinions" -- but their approach has been to cherrypick the few snippets that support the most sensational headlines, and then attribute them to "Journolist," or "journalists," as opposed to whichever specific person is being quoted.
Releasing all the e-mails is the simple solution, one I proposed on March 26, 2009, when the existence of the Journolist was first revealed and the issue was extreme nastiness directed at Marty Peretz of The New Republic. Given that there were hundreds of participants, the authors had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

At the time, Klein explained the purpose of the Journolist as follows (emphasis mine):
Journolist is meant to serve a very specific purpose that's actually related to my experience building this blog. The work of this site has always been to illuminate standard political reporting with expert policy commentary. In that, I've been helped by the many experts who have adopted the medium as their own: Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Matthew Holt, Peter Orszag, Andrew Gelman, Larry Bartels, Dani Rodrik, John Sides, among others. As a journalist, it's hard to always know who to call or which questions to ask. The joy of those blogs is that I don't have to guess what experts think is important: They simply explain what they think is important and I can use, or follow-up on, the information.
I responded that based upon the e-mails revealed in March 2009, there was (emphasis added):

"[n]ot much policy exchange here. This is how the liberal journalist elites talk when they think no one is listening. Like Barack Obama in San Francisco.

And Ezra Klein's explanation is at best misleading, at worst an outright lie. So Ezra, release ALL the e-mails.

Now that Klein again is claiming the e-mails are being taken out of context, and that the purpose of the Journolist was innocent and innocuous, Klein can set the record straight.

But he will not. In his post today Klein wrote:
And as for the obvious question -- why don't I just release all the e-mails? -- the answer is that I still believe people have the right to assume privacy when they send e-mails to an off-the-record list. They should be careful about what they write, but that's a different question.
Too late for that.

Klein accuses The Daily Caller of being shameless publicity hounds who take e-mails out of context to generate website traffic. Prove it.

Update: Mark Tapscott, First came Climategate, now it’s JournoList; Who’s next for an email scandal?

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Related Posts:
Release ALL The E-Mails, Ezra
Liberal Ugliness Revealed On The JournoList
Yes, Liberal Journalists Did Manipulate The 2008 Election

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16 comments:

  1. Its funny how these things fall into themes. Yesterday I talked about the banality of bias as a case of great minds thinking alike with you: http://allergic2bull.blogspot.com/2010/07/banality-of-bias.html That talked about how from liberal media bias to racial bias in various context, what is most damning is how this behavior failed to shock anyone witnessing it.

    Now today, we see a theme of people complaining that something is taken out of context, when they are in full possession of the context. So we see Ezra Klein saying, “if you released the whole archive.” Hey, Ezra, how about YOU release the archive? Otherwise stfu.

    And ditto with Ben Jealous. He released an alleged full version of the speech by Shirley Sherrod, except, its edited, too. http://allergic2bull.blogspot.com/2010/07/shirley-sherrod-story-gets-more.html

    And then he complains that breitbart snookered him. oh, except for the fact he was actually there when she made that speech. I mean there is that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Poor man. He got caught running a vast left-wing conspiracy, and now he's trying to weasel out.

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  3. Judging from his reactions to all of this, Klein, who claims to know some economics, has never to have heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Or if has heard of it, he is unable to apply to this case. Breitbart's offer of $100K is a wonderful example of the Prisoner's Dilemma in action--what is good for the individual is not, given the right incentives, good for the group.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Something doesn't add up.

    Take this sentence from the Ezra Klein link on your 3/26/09 entry: "There are no government or campaign employees on the list."

    However, earlier in the very same post, he said this: "I've been helped by the many experts who have adopted the medium as their own: Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Matthew Holt, Peter Orszag, Andrew Gelman, Larry Bartels, Dani Rodrik, John Sides, among others. "

    At the time of the post (march 2009), Orszag was head of the OMB.

    Is this the smoking gun?!?

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  5. @BF - my read is that he was referring to Orzag and the other listed people as those who blog, not necessarily those who were part of Journolist. But it is ambiguous.

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  6. Oh, yes, we know now how important CONTEXT is to liberals. At least, this week anyway. To liberals. No one else.

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  7. "Klein accuses The Daily Caller of being shameless publicity hounds who take e-mails out of context to generate website traffic."

    No, actually, The Daily Caller is simply doing investigative reporting on a real media story - how the "4th estate" and "unbiased media" are a myth in this Obamaworld.

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  8. Ezra would never dare release the entirety of Journolist entries, because he knows the content quite well. He complains about "cherry picking" and "out of context" reporting by Daily Caller, in a feeble attempt to deflect attention. He even has the nerve to talk 'down' when referring to DC, when what he really ought to be worrying about is which coming installment DC publishes will be the one that forces WaPo to can his Juicebox ass.

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  9. Geeeeeee, Ezra! Taking things from an individual and attributing them to the group in order to be sensational? That's a VERY horrible tac- oh wait it's exactly what Journolisters have been doing to the Tea Party...

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  10. It's not necessary to release all the private emails. I'd be satisfied if Dr. Spanier and Dr. Easterling at Penn State handled an investigation.
    I know their climategate investigation certainly answered all the questions I had about Dr. Mann. Hahahahahaha.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Yeah, sure. It's the old "out of context" excuse. Those e-mails are blatant in their anger, cheerleading and partisanship. There is no way in hell any other e-mails can somehow put that "into context." About the best they can do is show that the Journolistios are not always complete jerks, sometimes they are just lesser jerks.

    I guess next Hitler defenders will say that 'Mein Kampf" was only one book and using it to show Hitler was a racist is 'cherry picking' and that if you look at his life "in contest" you'll see that he was a saint.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "In his post today Klein wrote:

    And as for the obvious question -- why don't I just release all the e-mails? -- the answer is that I still believe people have the right to assume privacy when they send e-mails to an off-the-record list. They should be careful about what they write, but that's a different question."

    So if Ezra Klein just happens to be checking out trash cans in the alley behind Karl Rove's place for recyclables for comic book money, and he just happens to find an old disk drive that, once he scurries home and plugs it in, contains the e-mails from the Bush White House that went through the PRIVATE e-mail server at gwb43.com which presumably contained several PRIVATE non-government mailing lists, would he:

    A) Stay true to his stated principles, respect the senders' privacy and destroy the drive, or

    B) Break speed limits and the sound barrier getting it back to the WaPo and hitting the big red button that activates the Republican Scandal Alert that sets off klaxons and bells all over the building and automatically creates a "Bush Lied" headline in the next edition.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Someone should start setting up a Journolist wiki - each "journalist" could have his/her/its own entry, with Journolist quotes making up the body of the entry.

    A wiki would have the following advantages:

    1) It would provide a historical record of corrupt MSM journalism

    2) It would provide a lasting resource that can be repeatedly cited by blogging opponents of corrupt MSM journalism

    3) It would greatly enhance pageview/unique visitor counts to the wiki hosting site(s) - wikis by their persistent nature are much better internet traffic gatherers than transitory blogs. Each wiki entry would be repeatly cited on and on into the future - unlike blog entries that sooner or later get buried in archives/lose their URL validity, etc.

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  14. Here's a compromise. Why doesn't Klein release the exonerating emails? Let's see the emails where the liberal journalists say to Sarah Spitz... "Dude, that is so not cool, wishing for Limbaugh to die like that." Let's see the emails where all these liberal journalists say, "We should cover the Jeremiah Wright story. If John McCain went to a racist, anti-American church, we'd cover it."

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  15. "They simply explain what they think is important and I can use, or follow-up on, the information."
    ==============
    Mmm-hmmm. "What they think is important", as made evident the day after Obama "accepted McChrystal's resignation" and assigned Petraeus to oversee the Afghanistan war: announcers from several different networks somehow independently concluded that Obama's choice was a "brilliant" move, a "brilliant" choice.

    (Don't remember which Fox News show showed a half-dozen clips of the "brilliant" statement being parroted by all those well-paid "news analysts" from NBC, CNN, CBS, whoever else they were; but the point was that they all used the same word. Not "incisive", not "masterful", not "intelligent", not "well-considered"... Every one said it was "brilliant".)

    ReplyDelete
  16. reminds me of climategate. "Hide the decline" is just an innocent remark and taken out of context

    ReplyDelete