The JournoList was revealed by Politico. The founder of the JournoList, Ezra Klein, explained the purpose 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.
Oh really. That explanation worked only when the e-mails were secret. Now one of the e-mail chains has been revealed by Mickey Kaus at Slate, and it is not pretty. Not much policy wonking, and lot of name called directed at Marty Peretz (see related post). Here are a selection of the exhanges posted at Slate (the term “[snip]” was inserted by Kauss to remove defamatory portions of the e-mails):
From: Chris Hayes Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:43:51 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 1:43 pm Subject: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Yglesias
points out on his Twitter feed that Peretz “has ethnic dislikes beyond arabs” I know this is a tiresome, but this kind of explicit racism is really, really, really fucked.From: Matthew Yglesias …@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:31 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:00 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I also read on TNR.com today that Jonah Goldberg, who believes that everyone on this list is a fascist, is “good-humored,” while Keith Olbermann’s work is best analogized to Glenn Beck or Michael Savage.
From: Michael Cohen …@yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:51:25 -0700 PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:51 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist Personally, I find Olbermann insufferable, but I’m not sure I buy the comparison. Michael Savage is a complete nut job and if he wasn’t on radio he would probably be standing on a street corner with a bullhorn bitching about socialism.
From: Eric Alterman …@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:56:38 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:56 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a crazy-Ass Racist Quit lying about my record, Jonathan Chait. Or at least check the archives before descinding into Kirchickism. What I posted about Eve was an article I PUBLISHED. It could hardly have been going behind her back to PUBLISH an article, could it? What I explained when you last leveled this false accusation … [SNIP] … was the fact that had I known Eve was on the list, I would not have posted it here, even though it was relevant to the discussion at hand, because a) I had no wish to hurt the feelings of someone I had never met, and b) this is no less important, I respect the value of civility on this list. As you well know, there are plenty of attacks going on between yourself, Matt, Ezra, Spencer, and myself that do not make it onto this list because we respect the importance of civility here. Or at least we did…. I expect Ezra will want to intervene here, but please do feel free to forward our exchange to Marty. I can only imagine how proud he’d be….
From: Eric Alterman …@aol.com> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:13:39 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 4:13 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist For the record boss man, I’m done. I merely responded to a series of false accusations made about me by Mr. Chait. You’ll note that I manfully (and womanfully) resisted the urge to join in the Marty bashing until lied about above…
Not 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.
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See these related posts: Liberal Ugliness Revealed On The JournoList; The JournoList Should Be Called The PlagiarList, My First Tweet: The JournoList Sure Has A Lot Of Anti-Semitic Commenters, Ezra Klein Smears Ann Althouse.
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