Should You Trust Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller on Anything? No
In case you were wondering...
The Daily Caller:
DAVID ROBERTS, GRIST: It’s all I can do not to start bawling....
JOHN BLEVINS, SOUTH TEXAS COLLEGE OF LAW: It’s all I can do to hold it together.
The actual conversation on election night, which of course puts these lines in a much different and more history-conscious light:
DAVID: I've spent much of this election struggling not to contemplate what an Obama victory would mean. After the crushing disappointments of 2000 and 2004, I haven't allowed myself to feel much hope or excitement. It's been head-down, day-to-day fighting for a long, long time. Big picture stuff has been pushed out.
Yet I find that as an Obama victory seems more tangible, all that feeling is fighting its way to the surface. When I look at pictures like the one attached, it's all I can do not to start bawling. The same is true when I hear all these reports, like Rich's, about extraordinary turnout and energy in places like NC. It's true when I hear Obama's speeches. It's true when I think about the fact that people who experienced a time when blacks had separate drinking fountains are now voting for a black president....
John: David - well said. I've been experiencing the same thing -- it's all I can do to hold it together. I think the most touching moments are the interviews/accounts of elderly black people voting/volunteering/etc. Like the video below (Charles Meets Barack) -- it's just an unbelievable historical moment.
And what's truly touching is that you can really feel the weight of so many past generations who have sacrificed so much to make it possible today.
And Ezra Klein writes:
Ezra Klein - When Tucker Carlson asked to join Journolist: I hoped to let my quick accounting of the constant inaccuracies in the Daily Caller's selective quotations from Journolist stand as my last word on the matter. But Tucker Carlson's sanctimonious and evasive statement on the way his site has been covering this story deserves a response. So allow me one more post.
Tucker's note doesn't bother to mention the actual questions that have been raised: That his stories have misstated fact, misled readers, and omitted evidence that would contradict his thesis. He doesn't explain how a thread in which no journalists suggested shutting down Fox News can be headlined "Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News." He doesn't tell us why an article about the open letter that originated on the list left out the fact that I subsequently banned any future letters from the list. He doesn't detail why his stories haven't mentioned that one of his own reporters was on the list -- his readers would presumably be interested to know that the Daily Caller was part of the liberal media conspiracy.
Instead, Tucker says, well, trust him. "I edited the first four stories myself," he writes, "and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with."
If this series now rests on Tucker's credibility, then let's talk about something else he doesn't mention: I tried to add him to the list. I tried to give him access to the archives. Voluntarily. Because though I believed it was important for the conversation to be off-the-record, I didn't believe there was anything to hide.
The e-mail came on May 25th. Tucker didn't ask that it be off-the-record, so I'm not breaking a confidence by publishing it. Here it is, in full:
Dear Ezra,
I keep hearing about how smart the policy conversations on JournoList are, and am starting to feel like I'm missing out by not reading them. Could I join?
I realize you and I don't share the same politics, but I can promise you I have no interest in flaming anyone or even debating (I get enough of that). I'm just interested in knowing what smart progressives are saying. It strikes me that's the one thing I'm missing in my daily reading.
Please tell me what you think. If it makes you uncomfortable, ask around. I'm pretty sure we know a lot of the same people.
All best,
Tucker Carlson.
At the time, I didn't know Carlson was working on a story about Journolist. And I'd long thought that the membership rules that had made sense in the beginning had begun to feed conspiracy theories on the right and cramp conversation inside the list. I wrote him back about 30 minutes later.
We definitely have friends in common, and I'd have no worries about you joining. The problem is I need to have clear rules, as i don't want to be in the position of forcing fine-grained membership tests based on opaque criteria. Thus far, it's been center to left, just because that was how people wanted it at the beginning in order to feel comfortable talking freely. I've been meaning for some time to ask the list about revisiting that, so I'll take this opportunity and get back to you.
I then wrote this e-mail to Journolist:
As folks know, there are a couple of rules for J List membership. One is that you can't be working for the government. Another is that you're center to left of center, as that was something various people wanted back in the day. I've gotten a couple of recent requests from conservatives who want to be added (and who are people I think this list might benefit from), however, and so it seems worth asking people whether they'd like to see the list opened up. Back in the day, I'd probably have let this lie, but given that Journolist now leaks like a sieve, it seems worth revisiting some of the decisions made when it was meant to be a more protected space.
As I see it, the pro of this is that it could make for more fun conversations. The con of it is that it becomes hard to decide who to add and who to leave off (I don't want to have to make subjective judgments, but I'm also not going to let Michelle Malkin hop onto the list), and it also could create even more possible leaks -- and now, they'd be leaks with more of an agenda, which could be much more destructive to trust on the list.
I want to be very clear about what I was suggesting: Adding someone to the list meant giving them access to the entirety of the archives. That didn't bother me very much. Sure, you could comb through tens of thousands of e-mails and pull intemperate moments and inartful wording out of context to embarrass people, but so long as you weren't there with an eye towards malice, you'd recognize it for what it was: A wonkish, fun, political yelling match. If it had been an international media conspiracy, I'd have never considered opening it up.
The idea was voted down. People worried about opening the archives to individuals who could help their careers by ripping e-mails out of context, misrepresenting the nature of the ongoing conversation, and bringing the world an exclusive look into The Great Journolist Conspiracy, as opposed to the daily life of Journolist, which even Carlson describes as "actually pretty banal."
Apologetically, I went back to Tucker and delivered the bad news. But I still liked the idea of a broader e-mail list, and I offered to partner with him to start one. "There was interest," I told him, "in creating a separate e-mail forum with a more bipartisan flavor (such that Journolist could keep its character, but something else could provide the service we're talking about), and if that's something you want to do, I'd be glad to work on it with you."
He asked again if he could join Journolist, maybe on a read-only basis. He never responded to the idea of creating a bipartisan list. I was disappointed, but didn't think much of it.
My mistake, obviously. But if this series rests on Tucker's credibility, that's a soft foundation indeed. At every turn, he's known about evidence that substantially complicates his picture of an international media conspiracy. He knows I tried to let him in, odd behavior for someone with so much to hide and so much to lose. He knows I let one of his reporters remain a member. He knows I banned -- and enforced the ban -- on the sort of coordinated letter that served as example one of the list's conspiracy. He knows -- and never, to my knowledge, corrected -- that his reporter misrepresented the dates of Dave Weigel's posts to make it look like things he wrote at the Washington Independent were written at the Washington Post. And that's not even to mention the more prosaic deceptions of his selective choice of threads, truncated quotations, and misleading headlines.
When I e-mailed him to ask about some of these omissions, his response was admission mixed with misdirection. "I don't have nearly the grounding in this that Strong does, but according to him you often come off as a voice for moderation, and I'm pretty sure he will make that clear in a subsequent story." Ah, the old "we'll be more truthful later."
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
