When Tucker Carlson asked to join Journolist

If this series now rests on Tucker’s credibility, then let’s talk about something else he doesn’t mention: I tried to add him to the list. I tried to give him access to the archives. Voluntarily. Because though I believed it was important for the conversation to be off-the-record, I didn’t believe there was anything to hide…

Apologetically, I went back to Tucker and delivered the bad news. But I still liked the idea of a broader e-mail list, and I offered to partner with him to start one. “There was interest,” I told him, “in creating a separate e-mail forum with a more bipartisan flavor (such that Journolist could keep its character, but something else could provide the service we’re talking about), and if that’s something you want to do, I’d be glad to work on it with you.”

He asked again if he could join Journolist, maybe on a read-only basis. He never responded to the idea of creating a bipartisan list. I was disappointed, but didn’t think much of it.

My mistake, obviously. But if this series rests on Tucker’s credibility, that’s a soft foundation indeed. At every turn, he’s known about evidence that substantially complicates his picture of an international media conspiracy. He knows I tried to let him in, odd behavior for someone with so much to hide and so much to lose. He knows I let one of his reporters remain a member. He knows I banned — and enforced the ban — on the sort of coordinated letter that served as example one of the list’s conspiracy. He knows — and never, to my knowledge, corrected — that his reporter misrepresented the dates of Dave Weigel’s posts to make it look like things he wrote at the Washington Independent were written at the Washington Post. And that’s not even to mention the more prosaic deceptions of his selective choice of threads, truncated quotations, and misleading headlines.