Palin Piles on Journolist

Journolist, if you're not a regular reader of the Daily Caller, was until recently a 400+ member email list started by Ezra Klein as a forum for journalists, academics, pundits, and others to debate the news of the day, from hashing over the latest policy hot button issue to parsing upcoming elections to, not frequently, trash talking about other people's favorite sports teams. After emails from Journolist were leaked earlier this summer, resulting in the end of Dave Weigel's tenure at the Washington Post, Ezra went all nuclear on the list, shutting it down. But it lives one, vibrantly, as the subject of a Daily Caller on-going series that extras email threads from the thousands that added up on the list over the years. The latest, for example, features some exhuberant emails that went back and forth after the election of Barack Obama. Now, it seems, Sarah Palin has gotten aboard, using her Facebook podium to decry Journolist as symptomatic of the problems of the "lamestream" media:

It seems The Daily Caller obtained copies of the JournoList email exchanges from the 2008 campaign having to do with the media’s coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then candidate Obama’s pastor of 20 years. It’s everything you may have suspected. ... It’s quite an eye-opener. It really says it all – though more will no doubt be revealed in the future, no doubt covering the lamestream media’s coverage of other issues and people. May the light keep shining!

Full disclosure is in order: I was on said Journolist, and found it a valuable resource and forum during its short life, even though I was almost entirely a lurker. You have to realize that the Daily Caller's on-going series is cherrypicking from an archive of thousands and thousands of emails, but those threads did take place. I suspect that many others on the list navigated the way that I did -- using Google Groups, and avoiding many of the eddied conversations that I had little or no interest in. Particularly the ones that involved just how badly Team X stunk this season. I found it useful, not for any sort of congealing of conventional wisdom, as some people have described it, but because it was, to me, some of the best of what the Internet could be: smart people, generally speaking, having often intelligent conversations that drew your attention to at least a handful of different perspectives on what was happening in the world. Whether there was group think or piling on is worth thinking about, I think, but it has to be done in the context of the tremendous amount of group think and piling on that pervades the broader Internet. If there was a community feel to Journolist, it was a community that was, more or less, built around the idea that people with a common interest -- politics -- also had an interest in batting around ideas, rather than always focusing relentlessly on scoring points. The early Internet held some promise as a medium that could support places for chatting, debating, and chewing over ideas, but I'd argue that we've seen a hardening of the space, at least on the political side of things, to the point where it seems like the only choices are to see people gathering online as engaging in either war or collusion.

In retrospect, the most noteworthy thing is that four hundred reasonably intelligent people could assume that their emails wouldn't, eventually, be broadcast to the greater world.