Yawn-Quake! Gawker Releases Several Days Worth Of Journolist Archives
Fans of HBO’s The Newsroom can get an early dose of political news nostalgia today, as Gawker released what it thought was the full archive of Journolist emails Friday morning, but which turns out to be about a week’s worth of emails from the Ezra Klein-run listserv that took down Dave Weigel by making him much more famous. Wrapped in several feet of metadata insulation are conversations about “the German vocational system” and basketball, from late June of 2010, proving that if there is a liberal media conspiracy, it is to cure insomnia in our lifetime.
For years, Journolist was a semi-open secret in political media, with a Keyser Soze-like mystique, if Keyser Soze had taken revenge on his enemies by boring them to death. To conservatives, it was a Rosetta Stone that, if found, would unlock the secrets to liberal media bias, and to liberals, it was an online Masonic lodge that outsiders made too big a deal out of. Run by The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the email chain included luminaries like Sam Stein, Ben Smith, Chris Hayes, Spencer Ackerman (who, it turns out, has an amusing fixation with plate glass windows), and the aforementioned Dave Weigel, plus a host of others. In order to join, you had to be referred by another member, and personally approved by Ezra Klein. Full disclosure: I was referred three separate times, by members not listed here, and was rejected each time. They were too busy saying privately what I was saying out loud.
Then, exactly three years ago, some of Dave Weigel’s emails were leaked, and then some more, in which Weigel was hilarious and 100% accurate about conservatives, and was forced to resign from his job at The Washington Post, where he had been their version of what is now Jennifer Rubin. Weigel became much more famous, and much more respected, while the right wing triumphantly acted like they had uncovered the liberal media conspiracy, and a good time was had by all. Ezra Klein shut down the list, probably just as he was about to invite me, and the name Journolist became just another buzzword that Freepers used in their comments.
That is, until today, when a new treasure trove of Journoliciousness fell into the lap of Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan:
Now, the hacker Guccifer has provided us with the copy of the Journolist archive. You can find it below. It appears to be the full archive, although there is no way for us to confirm that. (Update: It’s probably not, considering the volume of metadata on the pages.) It also appears to have been hacked from one of the Journolist members. As you can see, it is very long, and its formatting makes reading it somewhat difficult. Don’t blame us. This is simply a data dump— a public service, for those who may have been waiting breathlessly for the past four years to get at the raw material of what was once considered the very epicenter of the liberal Washington media cabal.
Yeah, there’s a lot of metadata, and very little actual conversation. What conversation there is consists of tangent-loaded discussions of New York City real estate, basketball, and relative wealth. Clicking and zooming on random passages produces the effect of half-listening to the chattiest douchebag at a cocktail party, just as your buzz is taking effect:
“…so I even got to go to coming-out parties in high school.”
“…I’d like to disabuse ppl of this notion that living in, say, ny is a luxury and so the cost of living merely reflects a choice to buy a luxury good.”
“…That would give me the vapors, too. As if!”
“…Joe the Plumber.”
“…The only black vote we got out of that was Lionel Hampton.”
The moral of this story, of course, is that the National Security Agency needs to hire everyone on this list. Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 for the full Journolist archive, but these guys never cracked, and have managed to keep most of it under wraps, even three years later.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
