"Journalists" Conspired to Kill the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Story

The Daily Caller, which already collected one scalp when Dave Wiegel was fired from the Washington Post after they revealed things he posted on the private chat room for media types called Journolist, is going after the rest of them today in this piece:

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”

(In an interview Monday, Tomasky defended his position, calling the ABC debate an example of shoddy journalism.)

Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.

Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed.

Read the rest of it here.  It just gets worse and worse.  Daily Caller names an awful lot of names.

And notice the section about calling Obama's detractors "racist".  That playbook is still being used today as various lefty groups go after the Tea Party or anyone else they see as a threat.

It's easy to understand why the Rev. Wright story bugged these liberals so much.  Not only was it highly damaging to Obama, but Rev. Wright was simply expressing what a lot of them already thought:  America is the source of evil in the modern world.  At least Rev. Wright had the courage of his convictions to express it, unlike most liberals in the media or politics who try to hide behind false patriotism.

It's clear that these liberal "journalists" were interested in saving Obama's butt regardless of any professional ethics they may have once claimed to honor.  Unfortunately, no amount of revelation will end the bias against conservatives and in favor of liberal policies and politicians.  It's inbred into these people from their earliest days in journalism school.  Shedding light on their bias won't make it go away - they'll just retrench and figure out how to promote liberalism from another angle.