But the people making the most stridently partisan comments in the invitation-only group weren’t reporters at all — they were out-of-the-closet liberals acting like, well, liberals.
“It really would have been laughable to imagine that me or Mike Allen or Joe Klein were taking message orders from bloggers,” says Journolist founder Ezra Klein, referring to reporters for Politico and Time. Klein, now a liberal blogger for The Washington Post, says he understands “how it comes off as coordination. But the great frustration is that it wasn’t.”
Carlson, an unabashed conservative and Fox News contributor, says: “I don’t think you can be a journalist and carry water for a politician, and that’s what they were doing: ‘Here’s the line on Palin.’ . . . These are political hacks, and I think they should stop calling themselves journalists. It discredits the rest of us.”
The key question is whether the openly opinionated commentators among Journolist’s 400 members were so swept away by ideology that they cared mainly about doing damage to the other side. The group consisted primarily of left-leaning commentators, bloggers and policy wonks, with some mainstream or centrist reporters as well. Conservatives — Carlson himself asked to join earlier this year, and Klein turned him down — were not accepted.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member