The echo chamber that left wing blogs consistently accused right-wing blogs of constructing is increasingly revealed to be at least in part a rejection. The revelation of the JournoList email group facilitating the construction and dissemination of talking points is solidifying into a good circumstantial case for outright collusion among left wing bloggers.
Given that the blogosphere is usually nothing more than just the repetition of partisan scripts (see any comments thread for evidence of this phenomenon), this might not seem to be a problem. But given the decline in available forums for actual debate of public policy, the continuation and even willful expansion of collusion in the service of non-responsiveness and deception has the potential to seriously undermine the ability of the public to accurate discern accurate information even if they are inclined to do so.
But of course the partisan hacks don’t care about that.
(For what it’s worth, I think the AIG furor is a distraction too. But I’m not plugged into the JournoList collusion machine, so I never got the memo. I had to think about it independently.)
UPDATE: JournoList member Ezra Klein denies any collusion, arguing that sometimes like-minded people simply agree. But even leaving aside the obvious hypocrisy and sycophancy of an invitation-only debating list where everyone agrees even before the first word is spoken, does anyone think for even a second that Ezra Klein himself and his many fans and imitators on the bloated left side of the blogosphere would not accuse the right wing of talking points collusion if the situation were reversed?
You and yours wrote the standards of judgment during your last few years of demonizing anything and everything to the right side of yourselves, Ezra. If you don’t like how it feels, maybe you could consider changing your own approaches. Then again, the conservatives probably “deserve it”, don’t they???
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Partisan-Hack-in-Chief Ezra Klein protests on Tom Maguire’s Just One Minute that it’s all just a coincidence, even though he himself founded JournoList to keep them lemmings on a straight course to that cliff, over which the group-thinkers will leap to what they think is a glorious future….!
I wonder how long it will take for the “it’s a coincidence” cry to be echoed by all the other blind no-exceptions-ever defenders of the saintly virtue of the left side of the blogosphere.
Talk about performative contradictions….
For about 18 months I have watched the internet blog wars/partisan talking points take place and I found increasingly that the left had all the answers and the right was without ammunition.
The right was being beaten senseless as if they had brought a knife to a gun fight only to find out the left not only had guns but they had nukes as well.
It just wasnt fair. Or so it seemed. I found the unified message of the left to be disconcerting but even I never dreamed that they would all be colluding in secret to put forth the same message daily in a unified effort to confuse the issues.
Its actually very smart and very effective and I have to sit back and take it all in now because it also seems to be nothing more then a massive propoganda machine and that inheritantly seems just wrong.
It explains a lot.