JournoList 2.0 is sold to Musk
Way long ago, before the advent of Twitter, there was a Twitter-like discussion board called JournoList. It was frequented by an invitation-only list of 400 or so left-leaning journalists, pundits, commentators, and airbags. The J-List, as it was sometimes called, gave budding propagandists a place to wash stories of the day, to frame messaging, and (let’s be real) to collude on narrative storytelling.
JournoList was a veritable Who’s Who of miscreants.
Ezra Klein, the “Washington wunderkind” as he was called, now at NYT, was then at the Washington Post when he created JournoList in February 2007. In homage to unbiased, objective journalistic standards, he justified the liberals-only secret handshake to gain entry to J-List as “not about fostering ideology but preventing a collapse into flame war. The emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology.”
Uh huh. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!
Good ol’ Ezra shut down J-List in June 2010 after Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s Daily Caller, exposed the List and some really crass comments therein.
It really was quite the scandal then.
Why do I bring this up now?
It’s because I have long seen striking parallels between JournoList and what Twitter had become — a JournoList 2.0. Whether through shadow banning or outright banning of counter-narrative voices, almost without exception conservative voices, Twitter had implemented its very own secret handshake to its very own JournoList.
Where the original JournoList listserv was designed to foster message discipline in private, in the social media sphere, you do so in public. But whether done in private or public, the end game was the same: to foist an agreed-to narrative on to the public.
Musk’s buying Twitter is akin to JournoList’s dissolution back in 2010. It deprives the Left of a monolithic message machine.
Finally, in a recent post, I indicated that Twitter’s content moderation policies were enacted starting in early 2012. This was six years after Twitter’s founding and about the time Twitter was really gaining traction — and not long after J-List was disbanded. If you were Deep State, Intel Community division, that would seems like an opportune time to cage the little bird and make it sing your tune.