BumpIt McCarthy Can’t Save Sinking Trawler; Palin Promoting Puerile Periodical

Once again, the Daily Caller is trying to hype its possession of purloined JournoList emails, with its usual blithe disregard for its own promise of “breaking news.” However, while the rest of the nation focuses on Shirley Sherrod, Tucker Carlson is bound and determined to get all the mileage he can out of his compendium of keyhole-listening, and push the story he’d like to be above the fold. Yesterday’s “JournoLister is helping decide where reporters sit in the White House Briefing room!” made hardly a plop, much less a splash, for the love of Heaven! Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Dear God, will the carnage never end?     

The real daily caller must be Carlson, whose reedy pleas for shoring up his lightweight prize were answered by Sarah Palin, the subject of today’s contextless sampling. Sarah obligingly contributes ballast and badly needed star-mojo through the lamestreaming media of her Twitter and Facebook  accounts, tweeting up Journolist with the gimlet-eyed vigour of a cute Roy Cohen (“The list of known members of the left-wing now-defunct JournoList listserv”!) and Facebooking it (No Media Bias? BOMBSHELL!) like a perky Richard Nixon.

Today, she provided an interview to the distressed vessel, in which she happily trots out her own well-known hatred for her media tormentors, and throws in an old, familiar untruth to boot: that “hordes of Obama’s opposition researchers-slash ‘reporters’” invaded Wasilla after her candidacy was announced, as if it were unreasonable for an unknown running for the vice-presidency to receive critical scrutiny.

Of course the promised Journolist red meat on BumpIt McCarthy turns out to be Jonathan Strong’s attempt to reheat another portion of weak soup:

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom

And there’s the crux of the poor old Caller’s problem: the people talking are columnists and freelance writers, not straight news reporters. Journolist was NOT a newsroom. Again and again, Jonathan Strong’s eyes bug out (sorry) at the prospect of catching the mainstream media with its pants down, and all he finds is known lefties in their flannels, acting like themselves.

Ann Althouse is one conservative not hiding her yawns behind her hand:

What’s the big deal there? Scherer isn’t proposing that the government shut down Fox News. He’s criticizing Fox News as not following good principles of journalism. It’s not even a complaint about the conservative slant.

Tucker Carlson has capped his Big week of trying to make himself heard above the Breitbart ahh-OO-gah klaxons with a publisher’s letter that is Sad Trombone in written form. He expected fury! And he didn’t get it:

The response hasn’t been all that furious, actually, probably because there isn’t much for the exposed members of Journolist to say

He tries to fight the inevitable observation that he just did a breathless exposé on the wetness of water with a gloriously self-unaware scolding for the JournoListers for their, gasp, partisanship:

What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of JournoList working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists

Said the man whose ears were still ringing from the boxing Jon Stewart had given them.

And no, none of the betrayed JournoListers were quoted out of context:

I edited the first four stories myself, and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.

Passed along without comment. Because I’m tired now, and that is the turkey leg AND pope’s nose of Carlson quotes.

Finally, the man who gigglingly bought Keith Olbermann’s name last week has a few words to say on bitchiness:

Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually. So while it might be amusing to air threads theorizing about the personal and sexual shortcomings of various New Republic staffers, we’ve decided to pull back.

Tucker has listened at the Keyhole of Shame and is embarrassed for you all.

Posted by Mrs. Polly on 07/22/10 at 05:09 PM • Permalink

And Carlson’s done something entirely unexpected for me—he’s made me see that when she puts the wine bottle down,* Althouse can show evidence of joined-up critical thinking and apply some of that legal gray matter she must have but which is usually not in great evidence. Like this:

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

Libel law allows individuals to sue over damage to their reputation. Private lawsuits. That would not be the government taking action against the network, and it’s certainly not a proposal to shut down Fox News.

Of course, her first commenter has to spoil the ambience, but I can’t blame her for that

g2loq said…

Althouse HAS to be nuanced doesn’t she ...

That’ll serve you well with that crowd.

All the way to the clitoridectomy table that is.

Shocking the things people express in informal settings. Shocking, I tell you.

As for Palin, given her track record with Alaskan bloggers and media, I have a feeling she’d have an exclusively state press staffed only with her highness-approved hacks set up within days of getting anywhere near the wheels of power, so I can’t take her any more seriously on this issue than I can on any other.

* Just kidding, Ann! Don’t sue me, sis.

Sorry, commenting is closed for this post.