'Journolist' Affair: School of Journolism
Ana Marie Cox

About a year ago, a reporter at Politico wrote a story about a chatty e-mail group comprised of (mostly) liberal (mostly) reporters: "Journolist." Born of a conversation thread started by the Washington Post's precocious policy blogger, Ezra Klein, the list was intended -- I think -- to be a kind of locker room of the mind: a place to kick around ideas, ask for people's contact info, and sound off about the news of the day in a casual, off-the-record setting.

A lot of people have a community like that in their lives. They're usually called "friends," and usually the general public doesn't care much about the e-mail traffic they generate -- they most assuredly aren't offered $100,000 for the archives of such conversations, which is what conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart said he'd give for "the Journolist archive," after it came out earlier this month that list members said uncharitable, even downright malicious, things about their ideological opponents.

Yes, it's true: Some people said mean things about other people. On the Internet. The Daily Caller, a conservative online magazine, has been leading this exercise in investigative journalism, unearthing, among other nefarious plots, a plan to send an open letter to ABC News complaining about its coverage of Obama. And it gets worse: The letter was actually written. And published!

Rightish news outlets have seized upon this collusion as evidence of, well, collusion. They're not wrong, really, in the sense that people who share interests and beliefs will often use a shared forum to generate interest and ideas. This happens on the right as well. You maybe have heard of prolific Facebooker and one-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

But as the critics put it, Journolist was not just a sounding board for like-minded professionals, it was a laboratory for liberal media message control, a place where famous (and not-very-famous) writers hammered out the talking points and agreed upon the narrative of the day.

The system worked so well that we're now in week two of normally sober, serious political reporters writing stories about how terrible it is for journalists to have opinions and talk about them with each other. Lindsay Lohan has better narrative control.

At least one reporter, Dave Weigel, lost his job due to not-very-well-thought-out collusion on Journolist. The Daily Caller is threatening to keep publishing the nastier bits of the chatter -- including a death wish for Rush Limbaugh -- so it's possible that Weigel won't be the only one sacrificed on the altar of objectivity.

Perhaps the only real crime in all this is that any journalist worth his or her salt would think something like Journolist would remain a secret. Journalists are in the business of spreading information, not containing it. The countdown to the demise of Journolist started the minute a third person was added.

Indeed, in the midst of the debate over conspiracies to control the narrative, real news happened: Dana Priest's excellent, searing expose on the degree to which our government has outsourced intelligence operations. That web of contractors, officials and foreign agents is the conspiracy that reaches into the lives of more ordinary Americans than any prattle about whose turn it is to write the next "Obama is awesome" story.

Given all the hand-wringing that Journolist has caused on the left and right, it's somewhat surprising that not one but two lists -- that I know of! -- have emerged to take its place in the political media-sphere. We'll see how long they last, but I'll tell you one thing: The bidding starts now.

(Ana Marie Cox is the founding editor of the political blog Wonkette and is the Washington correspondent for GQ magazine. She can also be seen on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show.")

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The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

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