Ezra Klein of Wash Post started the infamous listserv JournoList in Feb . of ’07 to provide:
An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.
That “smart” gets to me, smacking as it does of — may I say it? — elitism. A place for smart people, for people who produce smart conversation. The kind a fellow or gal can take seriously, without feeling impulse to raise brow ever so slightly, casting quick glance toward one’s intimate. Nothing crude, you know: “You’re full of shit” and all that. Just the brow and the glance and, with luck, managing to ignore the gauche thing you just heard.
It was to be an exchange that honored certain premises. “The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left,” among people unlikely to “embarrass each other.” It was to be nobody-here-but-us-chickens time. Take off your shoes and kick back, folks. You are now entering the comfort zone.
All well and good for a night on the town or in a bar or around a dinner table. But for working journalists, college professors, and the like for whom the truth presumably will out, whatever it may be, as part of their work day? Nope.
Blithe Spirit 