In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded JournoList, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, JournoList members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.

Yet JournoList’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

JournoList’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

Also included were numerous A-list columnists and top editors. Beyond the higher-ranking members were hundreds of lesser figures, many from Washington’s liberal magazines that have long served as a stable of talent from which mainstream media organizations grab talented young writers.

In the case of the Rev. Wright story, Obama was then being hurt politically for his decades-long association with the toxic pastor, who infamously called the Sept. 11 attacks America’s “chickens coming home to roost” and urged God to “damn” America rather than bless her.

Chris Hayes, a top editor for the liberal magazine The Nation, urged his colleagues in April 2008 to avoid the subject of Wright because talking about it at all would hurt Obama. Hayes directed his message specifically to the straight-news reporters reading his post, saying: “Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”

On the day Sen. John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate, JournoList members instantly mobilized to identify the most effective attack line against her.

“The criticism of her really, really needs to be ideological, not just about experience. If we concede she’s a ‘maverick,’ we will have done John McCain an enormous service,” said blogger Ed Kilgore.

Defenders of JournoList have pointed out that many of the most incendiary comments come from liberal opinion writers. They argue that those writers aren’t purporting to be neutral or objective, but are rather open about their opinions.

Of course, the defense does not absolve the dozens of straight-news reporters on the List. And it also ignores a key tenant of journalism: independence.

The public trusts journalists, even those writing “analysis,” to say what they believe, not what they believe needs to be said to help their political “team” or “side.” Michael Tomasky, a liberal columnist for The Guardian, recalled on JournoList how as an editor for a liberal magazine he would “correct interns, and not always politely, when they used ‘we’ to speak of Democrats.” The reason, he explained in an interview, is that journalists “need to retain enough independence to criticize when criticism is called for.”

How, then, to explain this quote regarding a possible, but disingenuous attack line against Sarah Palin: “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.”

That JournoList sentiment came from Ryan Avent, then a blogger for the nonpartisan Economist magazine, now an editor there.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reports that the members of JournoList, which Ezra Klein disbanded weeks ago, have since reunited in a new online forum and are coordinating their responses to The Daily Caller’s stories.

Led by blogger Matt Yglesias, their attacks have focused on questioning the context of the e-mails — an oft-used refuge for those caught saying embarrassing things.

How much context does one need, though, to understand “Call them racists”? And as the villain in a Clint Eastwood movie famously put it, who’s “we,” sucker?

Jonathan Strong is a writer for The Daily Caller.

Excerpts from JournoList;

ON OBAMA

When Obama won, reporter Alyssa Rosenberg of Government Executive magazine ditched her neutrality. “A lot of horribly ugly stuff got repudiated tonight. But it doesn’t end here. We need to keep making the case to the folks who disagreed with us.”

ON RUSH LIMBAUGH

Asked how she would react if Rush Limbaugh were having a heart attack right in front of her, Sarah Spitz, a producer for Southern California NPR affiliate KCRW, said she would “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.”

ON SARAH PALIN

“Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks,” Ed Kilgore, managing editor of the Democratic Strategist, wrote. “Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider.’ What we can do is to expose her ideology.”

ON THE REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

“Whether we are defending Wright or repudiating him, we are talking about what liberalism’s enemies want us to be talking about,” David Roberts of Grist magazine said. “The problem is that none of us are thinking about how to take control of the discussion.”