I’m not sure how the Daily Caller obtained e-mail threads from “JournoList.” I don’t know whether they are in possession of the whole archive or merely snippets. And I don’t know if it is Jonathan Strong or Tucker Carlson who controls them. But if either or both have the threads in which the comments they’ve reported originally appear, it is incumbent on them to release them to the public.

The DC has crossed a kind of Rubicon in deciding to print e-mails from an off-the-record distribution list. There is probably a good journalistic (and undoubtedly a good financial) argument for doing so. But to avoid charges of sensationalism, the public should be able to see the context in which the most incendiary remarks were made. It won’t change the indiscriminate call to brand conservative critics of Obama as “racists” or the intemperate wish for Rush Limbaugh’s untimely demise. But it will reveal whether such comments were aberrations, and make clear how other members of the list responded to them at the time.

It is especially important for Carlson to back up the impression of the list conveyed by the stories he’s published, since HuffPo’s Sam Stein revealed today that a Daily Caller reporter, now with The Hill, was himself on JournoList while working for Carlson. That reporter, Gautham Nagesh, told Stein:

“I joined Journolist after [it was exposed in a Politico article] hoping to get an inside view of the left wing media conspiracy,” he told the Huffington Post. “And unfortunately all I found was a wonkish listserv of like-minded people discussing topics that interested them. I found it extremely useful for putting me in contact with sources and exposing me to a side of the blogosphere I wasn’t well connected with.”

So I say again to Tucker and Jonathan: release the threads.