On this weekend's Fox News Watch, panelist Jim Pinkerton proposed a simple way to clear up much of the murk surrounding JournoList. Let the Washington Post respond to the 20 questions about the matter that MRC head Brent Bozell has posed to the Post's executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, in an open letter.
JournoList was created by lefty blogger Ezra Klein in 2007, who continued to run it after becoming a Post staffer in 2009.
Responding to Pinkerton's proposal, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican, a liberal member of the News Watch panel, swung and missed at Bozell . . .
JIM PINKERTON: There's a way to deal with this. Marcus Brauchli, who's the editor of the Washington Post, and the boss of Ezra Klein, who is the founder of JournoList, could answer Brent Bozell's detailed letter, and answer the 20 questions that Brent Bozell posed to Brauchli, most of which are along the lines of "did you know what Ezra Klein was doing? Is this in keeping with theWashington Post ethics code?" and so on. He could answer all those questions and put this whole thing to bed.
ELLIS HENICAN: I'm not buying Brent Bozell as a fair judge of it.
Henican's swipe was beside the point. It's not about Bozell. His questions, and the Post's answers, would speak for themselves--and go a long way toward clearing up the issues of journalistic ethics for the Post, and the media in general, that the JournoList matter has raised.
