I am having trouble seeing why I should be worked up by the idea that some liberal opinion journalists, policy experts, and MSM reporters maintain an off-the-record email discussion group. Yes, the inclusion of the MSM types is a telling indicator of their actual political sympathies–but we already have a surfeit of evidence for that. Yes, there is some risk that participation in this private conversation will lead its participants to groupthink. But presumably it will have this effect primarily on participants who only socialize with like-minded people and only read ideologically congenial material. Even in those cases, it seems likely to be a relatively unimportant contributor to their closed-mindedness. (The reporters could just make phone calls to like-minded people on their own, right?) The story about George Stephanopoulos’s daily phone calls with Democratic strategists strikes me as much more problematic.