I've been making fun of bloggers like Andrew Breitbart and Ann Althouse who have dreamt up all kinds of crazy descriptions for Journolist and what happened on the now-defunct listserv where journalists and academics exchanged off-the-record emails during the last four years. It's been amusing to read the uninformed, right-wing proclamations about how Journolist functioned as a hugely influential cabal where journalists schemed to spin the news in a progressive directions; where the nation's most powers reporters and editors collaborated and plotted.

From Breitbart [emphasis added]:

Like a ventriloquist's dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was [Ezra] Klein's “JournoList.”

Whatever you say Andrew.

But if Breitbart's conspiratorial take is true, than perhaps he can explain this week's findings that documented how the U.S. news media suddenly stopped referring to waterboarding as “torture” during the Bush years, despite decades of previous coverage when the U.S. news media did refer to waterboarding as “torture.”

From Glenn Greenwald:

A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as “torture” -- until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture

Aren't you confused? If reporters and pundits were meeting on Journolist and forming progressive talking points to spread through the mainstream media, why did the nation's largest newspapers uniformly change the way they referred to waterboarding during the Bush years? Why did journalists suddenly spin torture news to benefit the GOP White House by all but refusing to call it torture if the same journalists were committed, via Journolist, to make sure all the news Americans received had a distinctly liberal feel?

In other words, why did the D.C. press corps morph into lapdogs under Bush when they were meeting on Journolist and plotting how to destroy Republicans?

And oh, BTW, did I mention that, once again, Breitbart has no idea what he's talking about?