The running theme to the series of Journolist stories from Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller has been that the many-hundreds-strong email listserv was Ground Zero of the evil liberal media conspiracy, a hive of scum and villainy from which left-leaning journalists and academics cackled and twisted their Snidely Whiplash mustaches as they plotted to attack Republicans and conservatives and protect progressives and Democrats. Many former Journolisters, including founder Ezra Klein, have complained that the Daily Caller omitted key details and quoted selectively in establishing this theme, and said that Journolist was actually “a long-running argument between people who had different views and different interests.”

Now, having long since run out of material they could twist into misleading and scandalous headlines, the Daily Caller has published an article letting us know that not all the members of Journolist were bad guys, and some were actually “heroes” for expressing “admirable integrity or civility.” Most infuriatingly, the latest Daily Caller describes Journolist as follows: “But the 400-member listserv, like any community, was a complex arrangement comprised of many individual voices.”

It was exactly that sort of perspective that Klein complained was lacking from the Daily Caller's Journolist coverage. And now that they've spent the better part of a week smearing the journalists and academics on the list with a broad brush, they've suddenly decided that it's time to add the proper context to their reporting and make known the key nuances. By highlighting the “heroes” of Journolist, they're essentially admitting that they misled everyone with their earlier reporting, but are also trying to appear magnanimous in process.

It's flagrantly dishonest and cowardly in the extreme. Also, I'm not sure that anyone from the Daily Caller really has the standing to critique the journalistic integrity of others, given their own recent lapses.