I had meant to highlight this earlier. And frankly, I didn't think cons were still going to be hyperventilating this week over listserv emails.(Remember when media scandals were actually, y'know, interesting?) But since the smelling salts are still out and since cons are still hyperventilating, or more precisely, cons are pretending to hyperventilate, and pretending the emails from the defunct Journolist represents some sort of Moses-like revelation, I thought I'd spoil the fun with some facts.

You'll recall this whole story was started with the inaccurate claim that a cabal of liberal journalists cabal-ed and conspired to “kill” and "bury" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story during early 2008 when the topic was presenting a problem for candidate Obama. The cabal-ing scribes schemed and “killed” the story. They plotted, via their octopus-like tentacles, to make the story disappear. They constructed a “Wright-free zone.” Because that's what dedicated cabal-ists do!

Except that, of course, that's not what happened.

The Wright story broke in mid-March, 2008. And guess what? Between mid-March and the end of the following April, more than 6,000 Wright-and-Obama-related news stories/commentaries appeared in the U.S. press, according to a search of Nexis. That's right, more than 6,000.

For those keeping score at home, there were approximately 5,000 newspaper hits, almost 1,000 television segments, and nearly 250 magazine mentions.

As for the supposedly liberal New York Times and Washington Post, which, of course, would have been on the front lines of any cabal-y effort to “kill” the Wright story, the two Wright-obsessed dailies published just shy of 200 news stories and/or commentaries that mentioned the topic during March and April of 2008.

So, no. Nobody was able to “kill” the Wright story, which means the first claim that sprang from the phony Journolist conspiracy was provably false.