Mother Jones-Has Tucker Carlson Tainted His Journalistic Integrity?

Tucker Carlson:Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons

(Story reported by David Corn for Mother Jones Magazine)

Fri Aug. 6, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

To explain the Daily Caller's much-discussed and much-debated series that revealed private emails from JournoList, the now-defunct listserv for liberal journalists, academics, and policy wonks, Tucker Carlson, the conservative website's ever-feisty editor, published an open letter. Referring to the "exposed members" of JournoList, he gleefully boasted, "We caught them. They're ashamed." It's true that some of the J-Listers had been nabbed sharing intemperate comments or a bad idea or two that usually went nowhere. But with a fair amount of indignation, Carlson declared that the primary sin of the JournoListers was partisanship:

To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

Is partisanship always and truly "dishonest" by its nature? Whether or not that's the case, would it be wrong by Carlson's standards for a journalist to help a partisan group raise money for its partisan activists? I ask because a few days ago I stumbled upon a website for a Republican outfit featuring Carlson as its special guest for its annual fundraiser.

(click here to read the full story on the Mother Jones Magazine website)