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"On Sept. 8, 2008, five days after Palin?s national debut, some members of the group discussed producing coordinated propaganda designed to wound Palin and boost Obama."

Writes Jonathan Strong in The Daily Caller:

Ryan Avent, then a freelance blogger for the Economist, now an editor there, complained that Obama?s supporters were missing a chance to attack. ?If we were the GOP, we?d be taking this opportunity to shout long and loud how unprepared Palin is??She doesn?t even know what Fannie and Freddie are?in the middle of a housing crisis!??.That?s the difference in the game as played by us and by them.?

Michael Tomasky responded: ?So why aren?t Dems doing that? Just wundrin?.?

Luke Mitchell, then a senior editor at Harper?s magazine, asked Tomasky if his paper would be able to help: ?Michael ? Isn?t this something that can be fanned a bit by, say, the Guardian??...

?... [I]t seems to me that a concerted effort on the part of the left partisan press could be useful. Why geld ourselves? A lot of the people on this list work for organizations that are far more influential than, say, the Washington Times.

?Open question: Would it be a good use of this list to co-ordinate a message of the week along the lines of the GOP? Or is that too loathsome? It certainly sounds loathsome. But so does losing!?

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, the founder of Journolist, quickly jumped in: ?Nope, no message coordination. I?m not even sure that would be legal. This is a discussion list, though, and I want it to retain that character,? he wrote.

So we see the suggestion of propaganda/message coordination, presented as probably too loathsome to do and then immediately nixed by the list founder, Ezra Klein. The headline of Strong's article is "Journolist debates making its coordination with Obama explicit," suggesting that they were coordinating, but this was just the point where they openly talked about what they were doing... except they only talked about doing it in the future.

Full post as published by Althouse on July 26, 2010 (boomark / email).