Washington Post Claims Journolistgate is a Right Wing Conspiracy

Greg Sargent is getting a lot of laughs over his column at The Washington Post today where he claims "The Daily Caller appears to be deliberately picking subjects from J-List threads that will get it maximum pickup from the conservative media -- and right-leaning outlets are obliging." He calls it a "conservative media conspiracy, not liberal one." When you're done laughing, allow me to explain how Sargent's article actually could be used to teach journalism students how things get reported in the mainstream media. And with a little help from this blogger, could also be used to teach journalism students how conservatives are learning to use the tactics needed to win a game where liberals own the board and make the rules as a result of their 2008 electoral win.

Sargent's premise fails to refute anything the right has been saying about media bias. Because Ezra Klein did not sanction a message coordination doesn't mean that the liberal mainstream media's coordination and collusion to help Obama win the election didn't happen. That would be like kids in the lunchroom organizing a food fight and one kid says "I don't think we should," and one breaks out anyway.

Jedediah Bila clearly points out that the mainstream media talking points sounded too familiar to what the Journolist writers were communicating between themselves to be an accident. John Ziegler, who first investigated the issue right after the election writes today "there is no doubt that members of Journolist both tried and succeeded as injecting their opinions (in this case mostly discredited ones) disguised as fact into the mainstream through one of the most widely viewed and respected outlets we have left [NBC Nightly News], at the most advantageous moment possible."

While some may think Greg Sargent is off his rocker, I submit that he's not. Unlike Al Franken who made a complete fool of himself the other night at the Netroots meeting of progressive bloggers, Sargent is only doing his duty to his fellow Journolisters and his employer, The Washington Post. He had to. Conservatives played the game properly and elicited the proper response.

Once conservatives realized that they are in a steel cage with liberals, the notion of playing nice was over. It's a matter of kill or be killed. Like a fighter who must bone up on their fighting technique if they ever hope to win the match, conservatives learned the moves and are now starting to use them. They used Alinsky's Rule 11: "If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside... every positive has its negative." When Andrew Breitbart put out the entirety of Shirley Sherrod's speech, the negative went all the way to the White House.

The conservatives are getting game savvy now and they are playing the liberal game better than the liberals. When Sargent reacted to the Daily Caller's article, it shows the conservatives successfully used Alinsky's Rule 10: "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign."

Effective use of both these rules explains the days of relentless Daily Caller stories about Journolistgate and it explains why the White House overreacted and fired Shirley Sherrod.

Conservatives have finally accepted the fact that they are going to have to beat liberals at their own game before they can change the rules. By using the new media, the voice of conservatism is no longer being drowned out by the mainstream media and intellectual elitists. They are seizing their opportunity now to turn the tables on the left. They are no longer bringing a knife to a gunfight.

John Hawkins wrote in May 2009:

...the aggressor sets the rules and if you want to survive, you have to play by those rules.

While we conservatives don’t have to stoop quite as low as the left has, we do need to start giving them a taste of their own medicine, if only to make them think twice about the way they’re treating our side.

Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber?

It sounds like someone at the Daily Caller was listening.

Anchorman wrote:

Level a charge of civil rights fake hate, we’ll return volley with a real one. Chant “No justice, no peace!” and we’ll spring an ACORN video on you. Play your recordings of death threats, and we’ll play ours. Try cap-and-trade, we’ll hack some more East Anglia e-mails.

We can both play the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” game. We can both fight with any means to justify the ends, as Saul would have us do. But there is one difference between the two sides in this battle which shows every intention of escalating. The long hairs who wrote the U.S. Constitution are on our side. And we’re gonna let their freak flag fly.

The least the liberals could do is compliment conservatives on their technique. The replay shows that the play was executed perfectly. The liberal reaction to Breitbart and The Daily Caller clearly proves that liberals are much better at hating the player than they are at hating the game.

Some are going to say conservatives need to be bigger than that. There may have been a time for that and there may be a time again for that, but it's not now. Some may say two wrongs don't make a right. But then again, sometimes three lefts do.

← The left took us here
↓   This is what we're doing now
→ This is where we are going to end up when we fix it

The conservative movement didn't defend itself or its leader George W. Bush during the 2000's. Look what happened. The left isn't playing bean bag. Why should conservatives? Fighting fire with fire is not a bad thing, especially if you have been burnt.

Palin smears and Obama cheers have been getting run up the media flagpole to the big media outlets for the last two years. Here's the journalism lesson about how that works from Greg Sargent:

The Daily Caller builds stories by cherry-picking from threads about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh -- and gets rewarded with pickup on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It does a story transforming J-List discussion about Sarah Palin into "coordination," and Palin -- who's fast becoming a media figure in her own right -- responds by giving it a big push herself. And on and on.

Uh, yeah.

Joe Schoffstall says it best:

Then you have progressive groups such as Think Progress– whose tactics are much more controversial than Breitbart’s – who get a free pass. Think Progress was caught altering videos and putting “racist” plants into crowds at Tea Parties to prove “racism” was there– a complete fraud. But nope, no media coverage on that. That’s allowed through the double standard.

Didn't Think Progress, Trig Truthers, Palin bashers and Obamamaniacs not teach us how to use this technique? Isn't this how the game is supposed to be played? I don't understand the liberal outrage, unless of course it's based in hypocrisy. Either that or they're just bad sports.