Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on July 22, 2010

Photo of Sarah Palin's visit to Kuwait to meet with our heroes, our deployed troops... there is now proof that members of the left-wing 'JournoList' viciously conspired to destroy her

What is most troubling to me, as more of the deplorable tactics and thuggery of the left-wing JournoLists’ — a liberal media “cover up” club — agenda are surfacing, is that journalism in a free society has an urgent, honorable responsibility to inform the public about the facts, particularly those that pertain to the government. Members of the press are expected to remain untarnished by the siren call of partisan wooing — they are the front-line warriors who are expected to keep government honest, who champion and report the truth to the American public. They are suppose to shine the burning-hot light of their power on corruption. It’s their duty.

Or, at least it was once upon a time.

The elitist, unethical, left-wing members of the JournoList, a 400-plus group of the most influential, liberal members of the press, have, in their partisan arrogance, forgotten that their role in communicating honestly and unbiasedly to the American people is the basis of their protection under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

They buried information about Barack Obama’s America-and-whites-hating pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, were instrumental in killing or downplaying John Edwards/Rielle Hunter’s affair, ACORN’s corruption, Obama’s questionable, seedy associations with radicals and the gaps in his concealed background, and anything else that threatened the Democrat party’s victories at the election polls. Surely there were prominent journalists with ethics who were not a part of this attack group who knew about it… they remained silent. Despicable.

But the biggest, most heinous attacks from the JournoList were still to come — their groundless, poisonous attacks on the tea parties that would pop up across America months later would pale in comparison to what they orchestrated against Gov. Sarah Palin.

During the late summer of 2008, GOP presidential hopeful John McCain announced Palin as his VP running mate. At the time, while not known nationally, her approval rating as an accomplished governor was in the 80 percent range, the highest of any governor in the nation. Liberals freaked out.

Had McCain chosen anyone else, that politician would have presented no problem to the liberal press to pummel and potentially defeat. Business as usual, bloodshed as usual. However, Alaska’s conservative Palin was unlike any other candidate they had fought against in recent history. She would prove to be the JournoListers’ ultimate challenge.

Lawyers from Obama’s court, about 30 of them, flew up to Alaska soon after the Palin announcement was made. Their mission: dig up all dirt on the governor they could. When that proved to be futile, the next logical step was to attack her with lies. And that is where the liberal JournoListers played their insidious role in their destruction of Sarah Palin.

From Gateway Pundit, Whoa! New Journolist Documents Show How Liberal Media Formed Plan of Attack to Destroy Sarah Palin:

Now there is not only speculation but proof that there was indeed a meticulously planned media attack on Sarah Palin.

So, these statist junkyard dogs revved up a hate campaign, mired in lies and character assassination. They worked zealously against her in a media attack that has defied comparison, resorting to vicious attacks on her from a number of angles — they criticized her as a woman, as a mother, they railed against her political experience, her folksy accent and vocabulary, her physical appearance, her Christian faith, her conservative values, her marriage, her pregnant teenage daughter, even her Downs syndrome baby… nothing was off limits. The liberal media dished up or fabricated any and all vitriol they could throw at her.

They thought she’d go away. She proved them wrong.

A lesser person would have crumbled, would have lashed out, would have ultimately broken down. Sarah Palin did not.

A portion of the shocking piece, reported by The Daily Caller, When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack:

In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”

Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has as much experience as the Democratic nominee.”

“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point. Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.

“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.

[...]

Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist blog, argued that journalists and others trying to help the Obama campaign should focus on Palin’s beliefs. “The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service. And let’s don’t concede the claim that [Hillary Clinton] supporters are likely to be very attracted to her,” Kilgore said.

Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin’s reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had “openly backed” parts of Obama’s energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he sent the information as a means of promoting a story he had written for Politico.

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get,” Hayes wrote.

Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: “I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views.”

Mother Jones’s Stein loved the idea. “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket,” he wrote.

Another writer from Mother Jones, Nick Baumann, had this idea: “Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’.”

Kilgore wasn’t sold: “I STRONGLY think the immediate task is to challenge the ‘maverick’ bullshit about Palin, which everybody on the tube is echoing. I’ll say it one more time: Palin is a hard-core conservative ideologue in every measurable way.”

From Andrew Breitbart, Big Journalism, JournoList: …Yes, But the Reporters at Pravda Weren’t Such Insufferable Assholes:

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy.

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do.

The only way that the media will recover from the horrifying discoveries found in the Journolist is to investigate and investigate until every guilty reporter, professor and institution is laid bare begging America for forgiveness. Will they do it?

If the powers that be don’t comply with this demand, we can always call Jonathan Alter and Eric Alterman racists.

Exclusive trailer for “Media Malpractice… How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted”

Video encore, from June 2009… John Ziegler lays MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer to the mat for the treatment of Sarah Palin and her family after David Letterman’s despicable joke about her daughter. I’ve embedded this video before, but it’s still a classic.

Sarah Palin Attacked by Media: John Ziegler vs MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer: “Cut his mic!”

Related JournoList reading:
Gateway Pundit: Andrew Breitbart: Journolist Is a “Watergate of Epic Proportions” & State-Run Media Is Burying the Story (Video) and Sarah Palin Responds to Liberal Media’s “Demented Conspiracy” Regarding Her Son Trig and Palin Lashes Out at Media for Recently Revealed & PROVEN Coordinated Attacks On Her During 2008 Election and Tucker Carlson: Journolist Members Targeted FOX News (Video) and More Hope & Change… Top Obama Adviser Participated on Journolist and Whoa! New Journolist Documents Show How Liberal Media Formed Plan of Attack to Destroy Sarah Palin and Journolist Reporter on Conservatives: “F***ing Nascar Retards” and Gay Tea Partiers Speak Out: “It Was Harder to Come Out as Conservative Than As Gay” (Video) and Breaking: Breitbart Offers $100,000 Reward For Journolist Archive and Stunner. WaPo “Conservative” Writer Was Member of Leftist “Journolist” Email List-Serv. and Busted… Proof That Far Left Media Hacks Are Colluding to Spin National News at JournoList
John Nolte, Big Journalism: Put Up or Shut Up, Ezra: Why Is JournoList Founder Klein Whining About Tucker Carlson?
Diary of a Mad Conservative: The authentic non-elitists and JournoList ‘journalists’ and The pseudo-intellectuals in the media
Moms 4 Sarah Palin: News Flash: Liberal Media Conspired Against Palin
Scotty Starnes’s Blog: Leftist Media Proves Their Bias with “Journolist”
Ace of Spades HQ: Ezra Wails: “I didn’t believe there was anything to hide.”
A Charging Elephant: JournoList and the Leftist Mentality
Politics Daily: Liberals on ‘Journolist’ Wanted Government to Shut Down Fox News
Christian Science Monitor: JournoList: Isolated case or the tip of the iceberg?
Big Government: Hubris and Humility: David Weigel Comes Clean on Washington Post, the D.C. Bubble, & the ‘Journolist’
The Sundries Shack: Journolistes Agonistes, or The Reporters Who Didn’t Bark in the Night
Nice Deb: Not That It Matters Anymore, But There WAS A Second Source For That 2008 Obama/Ayers Babysitting Story
The Daily Caller: Absence of integrity characterized Journolist scandal and Journolister apologizes for Rush Limbaugh comment and Journolist hurts journalists and 2008 – The year journalism really died and Five words to make any JournoLister nervous: ‘The second in a series’ and It’s wrong to lie about people you disagree with in an attempt to silence them and Conservatives Karl Rove and Fred Barnes respond to Journolist ‘racist’ post and Some reaction to today’s big story about JournoList and Rev. Wright and Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and A few excerpts from JournoList journalists and The Daily Caller’s publisher Neil Patel on Dave Weigel, Washington Post and JournoList and E-mails reveal Post reporter savaging conservatives, rooting for Democrats

Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 for the complete JournoList archive — the list of national journalists and reporters who were part of this elitist left-wing “cover up” club… estimated to be around 400. Breitbart has promised the source will be protected.

These statist miscreants, these journalist traitors have participated in one of the biggest journalistic frauds in all of US history. Blaming Bush, attacking Palin, discrediting FOX News, painting a biased, dishonest picture of Barack Obama… these comprise only a tiny portion of the scam.

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