Wondering why the Jeremiah Wright story didn’t get more play in the 2008 election? Wonder no more. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, members of the mainstream media plotted through left-wing mailing list “Journolist” to downplay the story or even change the subject entirely.

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, joined in on the plan to attack ABC News’s reporting. Covering the story at all was apparently “idiocy”.

“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.”

The story had to be killed or Barack Obama’s political aspirations may have been harmed, and these members of the mainstream media wouldn’t allow that. He was their candidate and they would protect him, even if it meant smearing his critics and attacking media outlets that dared to cover relevant stories like the Wright controversy.

But wait, there’s more! The pinnacle of hackishness:

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.

I especially like the part about “future behavior of the sort”. They were going to make sure that not only this story would be buried, but that journalists would think twice before covering news that might harm Obama moving forward.

The statement was crafted and released with help from columnists, journalism professors, and even current Obama Administration officials. But its success was short-lived as Wright again made his way into the news cycle. This time the solution was to simply ignore the story entirely.

Chris Hayes of the Nation appealed to his colleagues to avoid condemning the anti-American, conspiratorial, and even racist remarks made by Wright. After all, he said, Republicans torture and kill people…or something. Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent said he didn’t like “this shit” but, “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

You have to read the Daily Caller story to enjoy the full quotes. It’s like a laundry list of everything conservatives ever imagined liberal journalists were doing and saying behind the curtain of objectivity. Christmas has come early, and Tucker Carlson is the jolly old man with the red suit and the white beard.