JournoList: Advocacy masquerading as journalism

Friends on the JournoList assure me that it was a largely stultifying circle of policy wonks, so it’s theoretically possible that Weigel’s boisterous attitudinizing was the exception, not the rule. But what Klein doesn’t seem to understand is that his list has become the story, and that what real journalists do is get the story. Real journalists are not moonlighting policy mavens, angling for a job in the current or next Democrat administration by appearing on panels and going on television to advocate administration initiatives while news happens around them; their duty is to their publications and their readers, not their political party.

Given the embarrassing revelation — once again involving the Post — that one of its bloggers was also a White House functionary, a fact not disclosed to its readership, you would think the Post and the few grownups left there would want to clean up their act before they have not even a fig leaf of professional dignity intact. Which is why they ought to insist that Klein release the JournoList archives.

Then let real journalists sort through it and try to correlate the list’s talking points with the ostensibly unbiased coverage of its membership. See whether certain story clusters, with many of the same talking points, suddenly start appearing around the same time in various publications. In the old days reporters might share minor bits of information but two things they would never share were scoops and original insights, and the notion that the staffs of a great city’s multiple newspapers could possibly collude on shaping coverage would have been both antithetical to the idea of journalism itself and abhorrent to the fiercely competitive editors.