List-eria

By Steve Hynd

Today Michael Calderone, short of material for a real column, has a piece headlined "JournoList: Inside the echo chamber" about a vast leftwing conspiracy being directed by Ezra Klein through a listserv group of journalists, bloggers and policy wonks. Being dishonest people who will happily distort to advance their side's political agenda, a load of rightwing bloggers have taken up the story and are baying at the moon about it.

Ezra does a fine job of ridiculing Calderone's piece on behalf of JList.

Journolist is meant to serve a very specific purpose that's actually related to my experience building this blog. The work of this site has always been to illuminate standard political reporting with expert policy commentary. In that, I've been helped by the many experts who have adopted the medium as their own: Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Matthew Holt, Peter Orszag, Andrew Gelman, Larry Bartels, Dani Rodrik, John Sides, among others. As a journalist, it's hard to always know who to call or which questions to ask. The joy of those blogs is that I don't have to guess what experts think is important: They simply explain what they think is important and I can use, or follow-up on, the information.

But not all policy experts have blogs. Many are frankly unsettled by the medium. They've been trained to view published material as almost sacrosanct: The product of much review and long reflection. That's great, but it doesn't obviate the value of off-the-cuff expertise. Sometimes I need to know about Pakistan before the ICG releases its report. Happily, in my experience, most wonks were more than willing to provide quick commentary e-mail. Which is why I created Journolist. The idea, then as now, was to foster a safe space where policy experts, academics, and journalists could freely talk through issues, bringing up the questions they considered urgent and the information they thought important, with the result being a more informed commentariat. It's been of immense value to me, and through that, of value to my readers.

As for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No. Is it off-the-record? Yes. The point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable offering informal analysis and testing out ideas. Is it an ornate temple where liberals get together to work out "talking points?" Of course not. Half the membership would instantly quit if anything like that emerged.

I'm not a member of J-List. I'm too small a fish for Ezra and his chums (and I often get the impression some think I'm too much of a loose cannon, too ready to criticize the Dems, Obama and the A-Listers themselves when I think they're showing tendencies towards kowtowing to establishment-think). I'm not a member of an even larger and more infamous listserv for A-Listers run by Matt Stoller either.

 But I'm a member of more than one listserv which serves as a forum for "thinking out loud" and getting feedback from peers - the results of which often find their way into blog posts. Some of those are "proggie only" because the members don't want their batting ideas around to descend into flame wars of right and left, others are bipartisan because they want to encourage bipartisan discussion and are willing to take the chance of flame wars. All are "off the record" because they want to encourage members to take intellectual chances they wouldn't in public forums. Some conservative bloggers are co-listers on one such foreign policy discussion listerv with me, and I'm sure they belong to lists that exclude DFHs like me as well as other bipartisan groups I've never been invited to. In all cases, writing that if they're off the record and staunchly partisan then they must be simply echo chambers is dishonest commentary.

But in any case Calderone is backing off the headline, disclaiming responsibility for it. And as Ben Smith points out, for a super-double secret listserv Calderone seems to have no trouble finding out what is going on at J-List almost as soon as the members do. That's true of all such lists.

In any case, they're a useful, illuminating and private form of chatter; but they're also big and leaky enough, as the Freeman case showed, that their contents are likely to pop up increasingly at confirmation hearings.