Unforgivable betrayal.  These rat bastards ensured there would be no transparency.   These so called “journalists” are now contrite because they got caught, and not because they understood that they had destroyed what they were trained to do which is reporting the facts.

Somewhere along the way, things have gone terribly wrong. Journalism has become a toy, an electronic plaything. I do not blame technology. The giant megaphone of technology has been coupled with a new, angrier, more destructive age. (Yes, you can find extremely angry, extremely partisan times in our past, but I always thought the goal was to progress over the centuries, not regress.)

Until recently, there was a semisecret, off-the-record organization called Journolist. It was a listserv, which is a bunch of people who sign up (if allowed) and then get the same e-mails and can reply to everybody on the list.

Journolist was founded by Ezra Klein in early 2007, when he was 22 and working for the liberal publication The American Prospect. Klein continued running it when he went to The Washington Post in 2009. The Post is a mainstream publication, but Journolist was limited to those “from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left.”

Thanks Chuck Todd, but feigning naivete isn’t going to cut it.

“This has kept me up nights. I try to be fair. It’s very depressing.”

I know how he feels. Klein appears to be a very honorable guy, but I think he created a Frankenstein monster without meaning to do so. I vowed I would never pine for the Good Old Days — I believe the Good Old Days are ahead of us — but let me end with the words of Stanley Walker. He was a famous newspaper editor in the 1920s and ’30s and wrote the following, which I have edited for space. (And if he were writing today, I am reasonably sure he would have included women.)

“What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

“He hates lies and meanness and sham, but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

via Journolist veers out of bounds.

Lack of  journalistic integrity is not easily forgotten.  Now, the pendulum will swing the other way? Who pays?  The public.  A perfect summation of the games that are played.

Journolist was a terrible idea from the start, not so much because it enabled the promotion of “lock-steppedness” and a progressive party line across media organizations (though Salam more or less concedes that it did), or because it fostered an “us vs. them” mentality (which it also obviously did). It was a bad idea, mainly because it took a process that could have been public, democratic and transparent and gratuitously made it private, stratified and opaque.

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