Over at AmSpec, John Tabin has a good minority report on how conservatives should look at the JournoList saga (in short: as so much silliness). He also takes Tucker Carlson (mildly) to task for not doing as I — and many others, left and right — implored, and releasing the full JournoList threads for context:

It is a bit precious for Tucker Carlson, who spent years cohosting Crossfire with James Carville and Paul Begala — two of the most unprincipled Democratic hacks in the world — to act like he’s shocked, shocked to find evidence of partisanship among liberal commentators. (By implying symmetry between partisans on the left and opinionated but not-so-partisan commentators on the right, by the way, Crossfire did more to influence public discourse to the disadvantage of conservatives than Journolist could ever hope to.)
More seriously, Carlson is being flat-out disingenuous when he puts the burden on Journolist members to release the context of the threads that Jonathan Strong has reported on with a gloss that the people quoted all say is misleading. Everyone on Journolist was party to an off-the-record agreement. As explained above, having people trust you to keep conversations off the record is an important part of practicing journalism. (It shouldn’t be a surprise that my source, who was willing to break the agreement to the extent that he treated an off-the-record discussion as an on-background discussion, is an academic, not a journalist.) The Caller is in possession of the complete threads (I gave them too much credit when I assumed they must not be), and was not party to that agreement. If the Caller is witholding information from readers to sensationalize the narrative, as the people they’re quoting all claim that they are, they are practicing tabloid journalism.
And you know what? That’s okay! There’s room on our media landscape for tabloid journalism. The National Enquirer holds back information to sell more newspapers, and also pays sources. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t value in busting John Edwards when the mainstream media wouldn’t touch him, it just means that when you read the National Enquirer you have to keep in mind the kind of operation they run. If Tucker Carlson wants to run his website like a tabloid, he’s welcome to do so — but he shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about journalistic scruples.

I agree that the e-mails have some news value, and that there is certainly room on the blogosphere for them. But I’m glad that I didn’t have to make the editorial decision on whether or not to release them.