Andrew Breitbart on Journolist

Andrew Breitbart responds to Andrew Sullivan's ataack on his offer of $100,000 for the complete Journolist archive (ht Media Matters for America):

I was not invited to participate in that list for obvious reasons. I am not bound by those rules. Unless you are going to tell me that in the future, journalists are forever bound not to report information that others have agreed would remain private, you are holding me to a standard that no one else in the media would ever agree to. Such a standard would allow corporate, government and military malfeasance to flourish and would certainly prevent stories like the Risen and Lichtblau exposes in the New York Times from ever being published; even though the programs were top-secret, the Times was not bound by any privacy agreement.

Why was Mickey Kaus not excoriated for breaking the sacred JournoList bond when he posted a series of leaked emails that showed collusion against not-liberal-enough New Republic editor Marty Peretz for his crime of sticking up for Israel?

Kausfiles has obtained a copy of one JournoList discussion, focusing on New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (for whom I once worked.) This is not a parody! It’s the real thing. I don’t know whether or not it is representative. I’ve edited it only to remove potentially defamatory passages–those cuts are marked–and left out various boilerplate links and commands embedded in the thread, such as “Print” and “Report this message.” … I won’t add my own commentary, at least for now. Find your own lede! … Reminder to JournoList organizer E. Klein, who likes to take it private: All communications are on the record. …

Most information of value is held by people that don’t want it to be public. Not that anyone asked, but I would never divulge information discovered that was not pertinent to my stated mission, which is to point out the collusion between the political left and a journalist class that improbably claims there is no such thing as media bias and who dismiss those who accuse the media of having a left wing agenda as paranoid conspiracy theorists.

I would never divulge an individual’s sexual secrets. I did not learn that rule in journalism school, I learned that from my conscience. Something that I have come to realize is lacking in those journalists who claim out of one side of their mouth that they are objective reporters, but then seek the privacy of clubs, cliques and listservs, etc., to fight back against those that would challenge their false “objective order.”

When the talking points of the press match up with each other to the degree that they have in recent years,when the lexicon is virtually identical, when major stories are collectively ignored and the minor ones are collectively inflated, everyone notices.

IMHO, after reading the published excerpts, what went on on Journolist sounds suspiciously like "Two Minutes Hate" in Orwell's novel 1984. In Kaus's case study, Marty Peretz became a new Emmanuel Goldstein...In Weigel's instance, it was Drudge.