JournoList 2.0
The “Gamechanger Salon” list is Journolist 2.0, and it’s helping progressives control the narrative.
A Media Trackers open records request has revealed a secret Google group aimed at helping liberals influence public policy by driving the media narrative.
“Gamechanger Salon” is a (now not-so-) secret Google group with a membership of over 1000 left wing influencers. Media Trackers discovered the group after filing an open records request concerning a professor and activist at the University of Wisconsin. Members include journalists from outlets like the Huffington Post, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, and Media Matters, and activists from groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Change.org, Planned Parenthood, and the AFL-CIO.
In 2010, Legal Insurrection reported on the first “Journolist,” a similar group used to stack the deck against Republicans and conservatives:
For those of you who haven’t been here long, the JournoList was an email list serve organized prior to the 2008 election by Ezra Klein, now one of the lead writers at The Washington Post, in which various young bucks (uh oh, is that a dog whistle) and doe in the emerging melding of blogging and journalism traded various strategies.
Another of the JournoLists was Greg Sargent, one of WaPo’s lead bloggers and someone who helps funnel Democratic talking points into the mainstream media. Nate Silver, now of The New York Times, was on the list as well (although I will say I have found his work at The NY Times to be quite good), as was Ben Smith (formerly Politico, now BuzzFeed Politics) and several others at Politico.
Many of the JournoLists were rewarded after the election with access to the White House.
Although it’s natural for opinion journalists to share stories and theories with each other, Gamechanger Salon members appear to implement comprehensive strategies to completely control the discussion of particular topics in the mainstream media. Via Media Trackers:
Amanda Terkel, the “Senior Political Reporter and Politics Managing Editor at The Huffington Post,” is a member of Gamechanger Salon along with The Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim.
In mid-July, Terkel and Grim jointly wrote a piece about a leftwing effort to push Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) to run for president. The pair of reporters heavily quoted Erica Sagrans, a fellow member of Gamechanger Salon and leading organizer of the “Ready For Warren” effort, and cited Billy Wimsatt’s support for the project. Wimsatt’s work as founder of Gamechanger Salon and the reporters’ own membership in the group, along with Sagrans’ membership, went unreported.
In a subsequent piece Terkel again reported on the effort to recruit Warren for a presidential bid, and a previous piece by Grim contrasted Warren with presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
It’s not necessarily unethical for opinion journalists (notice my repeated use of the word “opinion”) to do this. The existence of Gamechanger Salon does, however, prove a point conservatives have made again and again about left wing bias in the mainstream media: it’s real, it’s spectacular, and it’s an extremely effective way of making sure right wing viewpoints stay out of sight.
Ethical quibbles aside (and I certainly have “ethical quibbles” with actual “reporters” colluding with liberals activists and calling it “news,”) this should act as an important lesson for conservatives who choose to jump down into the trenches and fight back the progressive narrative. The left wing of the American political spectrum is shameless. They’re not just messaging–they’re marketing, and it’s working out extremely well for them.
The advantage these journalists have is control over the media outlets average Americans read most. Our advantage, courtesy of Wisconsin open records laws, is that we now have a better idea of how they build messages with staying power. We can use this knowledge to both improve on their methods, and anticipate the connections they’ll use to make their arguments more persuasive.
In other words, we no longer have an excuse to not know what’s coming.
You can see the Gamechanger Salon membership list and policy manual here.
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Comments
It’s not necessarily unethical for opinion journalists (notice my repeated use of the word “opinion”) to do this.
Recall that we learned from JournoList that it was much more than that. It was also a place to coordinate the Left’s campaign of lies and slander. The most prominent was perhaps the tactic of attacking anyone as a “racist”. And it was freely acknowledged that such accusation had nothing at all to do with any evidence that the victim was indeed a racist of any sort. That certainly qualifies as “unethical” where I come from.
Ezra Klein admitted the “Journolist” had never really gone away after being exposed by Dave Weigel, who was upset that his fellow leftist members were calling him out for covering conservatives for WaPo when it was his job.
It never stopped.
The proof is evident when you see so many stories use the same exact catch phrases in the ledes, even though the writers and publications have no formal alliance. It happens all the time.
Klein, Yglesias, and every single member of either Journolist or the Gamechanger Salon is a leftist propagandist, a liar and manipulator for ideological reasons.
Man up, you weasels! At least Goebbels was proud of his service.
I always LOVE the pretensions of the Collective.
People who are too blinkered to realize THEY ARE the voluntary “Ministry Of Truth” for Big Brother, BUT who flatter themselves with the conceit they are “doing good for social justice”.
This is not “unethical”. It is outright evil.
I think many of them do realize it.
The Left found out that the media won’t out their lies during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals, as they cleverly turned the tables and made the story about Starr’s “investigations unlimited” and “all about sex” instead of perjury and obstruction and sexual harassment. That’s when “Talking Points Memo” began, named after the daily faxes the Clinton team sent out to keep a steady party line and save their boy.
Note that their “wonks” Klein & Yglesias have been proven wrong on nearly everything they said about health care. It didn’t faze them at all, they decided to Go Big (Lie) instead.
Unlike JourNoList at least there is a complete membership list of Gamechanger Salon which I hope gets repeatedly archived before it disappears down the memory hole.
JourNoList was, among other things, the vanguard of the Alinskyite war to destroy Sarah Palin.
The entire Gamechanger list is worth perusing. The word climate appears a lot. You know, climate the settled science. There are a lot of watermelon environmental organizations listed. There are many Soros funded organizations mentioned. Then are are several prominent academics who doubtless are called upon from time to time to give us their unbiased wisdom as talking heads.
It was actually formed to protect Obama. Palin became a target when she joined the opposing ticket.
These are all simply journalists on board with the cultural change view of both media and education (the reason I know about it) UNESCO began pushing in earnest in 2010. That’s when Bulgarian Irina Bokova took the helm, knowing a thing or two about manipulative propaganda guiding the prevailing public perception.
Here’s the essence: “humanity must force the media system as a whole to shoulder the obligation to stimulate this intense intercultural relation that the global world demands of us. We must force it to act as an interpreter and translator–cultural translation–among all humanity’s diverse codes…Tin other words, the goal is to align the entire media system with the obligation to make a systematic effort at mutual understanding among all the collectives, peoples, societies and communities in this global world.”
That mutual understanding even if false becomes the point of media and education at all levels. When President Obama see the MidEast problem in terms of the need for both sides to adopt the same outlook as he stated to Tom Friedman in his NYT interview, he is relying on this same view. It is a crucial component of community organizing, but as we are seeing it is dangerous in the real world.
It lives us unguarded until jets hit the WTC or there is a bomb at the Boston Marathon or Hamas keeps emerging from its tunnels to kill.
Oh, you are talking about big shots who feel entitled to tell us what to think. How old-Soviet-bloc of them.
It’s too bad we can’t empty that dustbin of history like we can the garbage can on our computers.
I looked up two of the members listing Indiana as home. One was a Mexican (I hate the made-up hispanic category) rabble rouser with an immigration bent from East Chicago (who was not a jouirnalist) and the other was an asian who pops from liberal cause to liberal cause. She is not a writer either and has left Bloomington for Providence (the one in Rhode Island).
It appears to me that this “journolist” is simply a resource listing for liberal causes.
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http://www.i24news.tv/en/tv/live