BREAKING: Weigel Resigns from WaPo and Atlantic~~!
By Matt Dornic on Jun 25, 2010 12:09 PM
FIRST ON FBDC: FishbowlDC has confirmed that WaPo conservative-beat blogger Dave Weigel has resigned after a slew of his anti-conservative comments and emails surfaced on FishbowlDC and Daily Caller over the last two days.
A spokesperson for the Post said the paper will not offer additional comments but confirmed that the writer's resignation was accepted.
mediabistro.com
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An Unhappy Day At The Washington Post
Jeffery Goldberg - The Atlantic
Jun 25 2010, 1:18 PM ET
But also sort of a happy day at The Washington Post, for the dwindling band of writers and editors there who value such old-fashioned traits as temperance in the expression of personal views; forthrightness; and fairness.
The liberal blogger Dave Weigel, who was hired by The Post to cover the conservative movement, has resigned, after advising Matt Drudge on a semi-public forum for leftish commentators to set himself on fire. Put aside the controversy over whether the Post, which was advised by its star blogger, Ezra Klein (who once advised parties unknown, via his Twitter account, to "fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick") that Weigel would do an excellent and balanced job of reporting on conservatives, even understood that it was hiring a liberal, and not a conservative (Ben Smith has more on this aspect of the controversy), the issue in the newsroom today is, How did the Post come to this?
"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."
I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.
theatlantic.com
AND From Politico Ben Smith:
Weigel and the Post
June 25, 2010
The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he's a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he's liberal is primarily the Post's fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper's brass to put him in an unsustainable position.
Weigel first had to apologize for a tweet expressing incomprehension of "bigots" who oppose same-sex marriage. He's now apologized for intemperate, leaked emails sent to a large, private listserv started by his Washington Post colleage, Ezra Klein. They were the sort of angry, snarky attacks that most people know better than to put in writing (though most people occasionally slip), and which nobody (other than certain aides to General Stanley McChrystal) would say knowingly for print.
But nobody would bother leaking what Klein himself wrote privately, or forwarding his tweets to management, to prove he was a crypto-liberal, because Klein isn't crypo-anything. He's a liberal blogger, and the Post hired him into a slot that required no pretense otherwise.
Weigel, whose stuff I enjoy, and whom I link almost daily here, has been the leading chronicler of the right-wing fringe since his time at Reason. I quoted him in 2008 as the leading expert on strange Obama smears. He also comes from the Washington tradition of responsible, ideological reporting at places from Reason to The American Prospect that don't require the sort of formal, careful neutrality that traditional newspaper reporters (like me) grew up with. Before the Post hired him, he'd written about whom he voted for and what he thought of various people and movements, and any of his regular readers knew that he'd migrated fairly comfortably into the liberal blogosphere, if its libertarian side. His keen understanding of the conservative fringe has been a source of steady entertainment to the left. There's no precise analog on the right, but conservatives take similar joy in reading, say, John Fund on ACORN.
But the Post seems simply not to have understood what they were getting when Klein suggested they hire him. National editor Kevin Merida told me for my story on the subject in May that he never asked Weigel about his politics, and Klein said he presented him to the paper simply as the best reporter covering conservatives. (Weigel's blog is subtitled, "Inside the conservative movement.")
“The way I explained Dave is that he’s the best reporter on the conservative movement beat,” Klein said, describing Weigel as “hard to characterize politically."
“I have not heard him express many policy opinions,” he said.
Merida, in a web chat in April, was asked if the paper would be "adding more conservative/Republican voices to better balance what is now your predominately liberal/Democratic leaning coverage?”
He replied, “[W]e recently have added to our staff the well-regarded Dave Weigel, and also mentioned columnists Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer. (Merida and a Post spokeswoman didn't respond to questions about Weigel this morning.)
There's a broader debate in journalism right now over whether reporters should strive for neutrality at all, or whether they should bring their own views and experiences into their writing. The Post's Klein, Weigel, and Greg Sargent (along with the fired Dan Froomkin) are the latter model, along with those at newer outlets from TPM to the Breitbart empire. Most of the rest of the Post's political reporters, and most of us at POLITICO, are the former. My personal view is that ideological and neutral journalism can flourish side by side, each going places the other is unwelcome, and each correcting for the other's weaknesses. (And neutral reporters don't have to be allergic to ideology: I'm on Journolist, Klein's off-record listserv; I also get in on private conservative conversations when they'll have me.)
But there's no sign the Post really thought this through. Even as old-timers rankled at the new hires, the paper -- scrambling for relevance on the Internet -- seems not to have considered what the buzzy personnel moves would mean for the paper's longstanding principles of detachment and neutrality in reporting.
One thing nobody argues is that publications should misrepresent and misidentify their own reporters. The Post set Weigel up for a fall, and themselves for embarrassment, and that's what they got today.
Posted by Ben Smith 11:28 AM |
