Update: James DeLong at The Enterprise Blog captures my reaction without my snark or underlying dislike of the media. H/T: NRO.

The Journolist quotes today released by The Daily Caller are nothing short of astounding. First of all, they confirm the worst paranoia of conservatives: the media has an outright agenda and has conspired to use their soap boxes to manipulate public opinion. Secondly, respected writers and opinion leaders are more than willing to throw their causes and values under the proverbial bus to advance the interests of the Democratic Party and specific liberal leaders.

And liberals call conservatives mindless lemmings…

I disagree with Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. He writes:

There is something to keep in mind in this particular story, which is that the people involved in the specific conversations regarding the smear are all opinion journalists, and not people filling roles in objective reporting.  The Prospect, the (Washington) Independent, and the Nation are all publications with an explicit point of view, although the Independent offers a little more of a pretense of traditional reporting.  That doesn’t relieve them of responsibility for proposing and/or considering an odious smear campaign, but it does make it difficult to tie this to other journalists filling a different role.

Sure, the individuals quoted in Daily Caller fall under “opinion writers,” but their opinions are hugely influential. Cable news channels, looking to fill hours and hours of airtime with commentary, often quote these specific writers or invite them to be interviewed. Their quotes and TV appearances are copied over and over in the blogosphere, effectively proving the words of Joseph Goebbels. Their words may originate as opinion, but they quickly enter the stream of “hard news.”

There’s no way of knowing how their Journolist comments influenced younger writers on the list or those working in nonprofits and think tanks. For example, if a young AP writer looks up to a well-known columnist spouting off opinions on Journolist, how do we know that coverage wasn’t tweaked? Those stories get filtered to smaller media markets and are often the only story presented on national or international news. Is it possible to fully grasp the amount of manipulation caused by influential writers with a political agenda?

This may be an extreme view, but Journolist shows collusion and conspiracy to promote one particular political agenda. Shouldn’t news outlets with any trace of integrity search their archives for similar phrasing to what was written in Journolist?

Journalism has never been an honorable field, but this really is a black mark on the industry. A group of people actively worked together to kill a story that possibly would have altered the 2008 election. What else have they conspired against? What other news have they manipulated and changed so that the American people only hear it from their perspective?

This also calls the entire racism debate into question. What is the exact state of race relations in America? If this was a convenient sleight-of-hand that liberals attempted to shift the focus of Jeremiah Wright and Obama, they had to know it would work. What other times have they tried it? What other stories have been manipulated, and individuals smeared to protect a particular leftist interest?

It’s pretty bad when journalism looks dirtier than public relations. At least folks in my industry are open about their biases.