Vast Left Wing Conspiracy!

The Wingers are going insane over this Politico.com story (natch) revealing a SUPER SECRET LEFT WING CONSPIRACY!!11!1eleventy-one!!

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say — off the record, of course — that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece — he won’t say which one — got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he’s seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.

“I’m very lazy about writing when I’m not getting paid,” Alterman said. “So if I take the trouble to write something in any detail on the list, I tend to cannibalize it. It doesn’t surprise me when I see things on the list on people’s blogs.”

Last April, criticism of ABC’s handling of a Democratic presidential debate took shape on JList before morphing into an open letter to the network, signed by more than 40 journalists and academics — many of whom are JList members.

Oh NOES! They're ganging up! They're organizing! It's a huge conspiracy to skew the news!

Or it's just an e-mail list.

If you would have told me this Politico story was excerpted from the Onion, I honestly would have believed you. Yes, this is a "reported" story about a secret email list for Beltway media elite to talk with each other and congratulate each other for having "fame" to be invited into this apparently high status symbol - as if the creation of said list, and its discussions, is "news." The story really epitomizes every stereotype of the Washington-New York Elite Media Cabal as an insulated status-obsessed hive of self-importance and political incest that is most focused on chattering amongst (and about) itself.

At one level, this is quite literally a "news" story about an email list - yes, a news story about an email list (what amazing grassroots organizing!). At another level, this piece is media reporting on media talking to other media about the media. At still another level of self-absorption, this piece is the New York-Washington Elite Media bragging about the New York-Washington Elite Media talking to fellow New York-Washington Elites about their exciting lives in New York and Washington (which might be fine for a social club - but as the subject of a political "news" story...uh, not so much). And yet, somehow, the elite press corps wonders why it is seen by the public at large as an increasingly irrelevant group of self-obsessed sycophants, and why so much of the public is turning elsewhere for news.

Honestly, journalists communicate with each other. You're telling me the Republican effort to e-mail RNC talking points to every newsie and blogger on the conservative side wasn't by the same logic a vast conspiracy?