This afternoon, my twitter feed erupted with references to Dave Weigel, a blogger for the Washington Post responsible for covering conservative politics. He made some derogatory comments about Matt Drudge and FOX news on Ezra Klein's Journolist that became public. He resigned from the Post. The listserv has been disbanded.
The Village Voice has a round-up of the affair. More from American Spectator and Blogging Heads. My, those DC bloggers are an incestuous little group, aren't they? Here's the Daily Caller. Ben Smith at Politico. Red State. Sounds like the guy is going to end up with a position on Huffington Post. Steve Benen.
Klein has a must-read post about the origins of Journolist and the "faux-intimacy" of the web. Wow. Love that phrase. I totally get it.
There's a lot of faux-intimacy on the Web. Readers like that intimacy,
or at least some of them do. But it's dangerous. A newspaper column is
public, and writers treat it as such. So too is a blog. But Twitter?
It's public, but it feels, somehow, looser, safer. Facebook is less
public than Twitter, and feels even more intimate. A private e-mail
list is not public, but it is electronically archived text, and it is
protected only by a password field and the good will of the members.
It's easy to talk as if it's private without considering the
possibility, unlikely as it is, that it will one day become public, and
that some ambitious gossip reporters will dig through it for an
exposure story. And because that possibility doesn't feel fully real,
people still talk like it's private and then get burned if it goes
public.
Sam Stein at the Huffington Post has more gossip about the resignation.
Most bloggers are outraged by this incident. Weigel, by all accounts, is a decent guy. You have to go to Ann Althouse and Pajamas Media to read posts that are gleeful about Weigel's departure.
And more from Julian Sanchez.
Jonathan Chait thinks that the WaPo didn't realize that Weigel wasn't a conservative when they hired him.
Only conservative reporters can interview conservative politicians? We're really in strange territory here.
Andrew Sullivan says that Weigel is a sane libertarian, not a liberal.
And from the other side. Jeffrey Goldberg says that Weigel said some really childish, unprofessional stuff on a public forum and should have known better. He also says the WaPo was stupid to hire him.
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.
UPDATE: David Weigel explains ALL.
Apt. 11d 
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequence. If either Weigel or the Post felt he could no longer be effective in his specific job (can’t see many of his conservative sources taking his calls now), the logical result is his resignation. I think he’ll land in a better place, he’s got a lot of sympathy from most media folks.
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Wow–the spammers are getting really good.
Everybody left and right seems to agree that Weigel is a nice guy in person, but telling several hundred of your electronic friends that you wish Drudge would set himself on fire, or jokingly hoping that Rush Limbaugh not survive chest pains, or suggesting that Etheridge was hugging his interlocutor in the recent video, as well as a multitude of other infractions makes it hard for the rest of us to really believe that. More importantly, his WaPo job was covering the right, and the large collection of derogatory quotes would make it hard for him to do that job well, since his more savvy sources might say, “Oh, you’re that guy,” and hang up the phone or delete the email query.
Jim Geraghty (and Mickey Kaus before him) think that there was a problem with the basic concept of Journolist:
“I suppose it’s possible that Journo-List really was set up to be a place to connect reporters and policy wonks, as Ezra Klein contends. Those of us on the outside can’t help but wonder if it’s how liberal bloggers and major left-of-center voices in the mainstream media work out their message coordination and sort out their differences away from the eyes of the public.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/230317/if-weigel-had-go-what-other-br-msm-figures-wrote-terrible-things-br-journo-list
Here’s an old post from 2009 from Mickey Kaus about Journolist and its potentially corrupting possibilities:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/03/18/whippersnappers-go-on-offense.aspx
I know some people around here don’t like Jonah Goldberg, but I think he’s said some interesting things in the past about how friendship can be just as corrupting as actual graft. Note that you couldn’t probably pay enough journalists off to suppress the Edwards scandal, but they did suppress it for a very long time, perhaps partly out of friendship, partly out of ideological solidarity.
Here’s part of a long thinky post from Ace (who likes Weigel) on why Weigel was not a good fit as a blogger for the Washington Post right wing beat:
http://minx.cc/?post=302995
“Because anyone who’s good at his job likes his job; that is to say, he uses a substantial amount of his free time actually doing job-related activities because he fundamentally likes his job. Almost anyone (except those with Batman-level discipline and willpower) who is good at his job will, if you check, be found to have a substantial advantage over his colleagues, because while they punch out at 5 to pursue their real interests, he’s spending a lot of time after 5 o’clock doing his job.
“Because for such a person, “pleasure” and “work” aren’t really entirely separate categories. They flow easily into each other.
“And that is one of the real keys for excellence.
“Those Wall Street guys doing all sorts of research as they take the train into NYC? They will always do better than their colleagues reading Scott Turow novels on their way to work. They got lucky — they found the perfect job for themselves. Something they like doing, and thus, are pretty much guaranteed to make a mint doing it.
“You just can’t force yourself to do a lot of down-time work for a job you don’t enjoy. Well… you can. And you’ll be unhappy, and it will be a constant struggle.
“But if you happen to find a job you really like? You’re golden.
“This is why Dave Wiegel doesn’t seem to really know what is going on on the right side of things, and pushes spin he finds on the left side of the blogosphere.”
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Jonah Goldberg, … said some interesting things
Except for the value of “interesting” where my crazy raving uncle or Art Bell has said some “interesting” things, I’m pretty sure this isn’t true. It’s not that I don’t like Goldberg- it’s that he’s too obviously stupid to say something interesting in any normal sense, except perhaps by accident.
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Jonathan Cheit thinks that the WaPo didn’t realize that Weigel wasn’t a conservative when they hired him.
Only conservative reporters can interview conservative politicians? We’re really in strange territory here.
A better way to put it is that they didn’t realize that he would be an advocate for mostly liberal positions. The most damning leaked email has nothing do with his potty mouth — I personally love that he introduced the word “ratfucker” into my home — but with his assertion that JournoListers must work together to emphasize that Coakley was a bad candidate and that it was not a referendum on Obama, because otherwise her loss might hurt the Democrats come fall. The next day he comes out with an article doing just that.
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Most bloggers are outraged by this incident.
Really? I’m not sure how you can back this statement, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that most bloggers you read are outraged. Dunno
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I found one of the Jonah Goldberg quotes (I think there may be others on how friendship corrupts in Washington). This one is from an article from 2005, during the Harriet Miers thing:
“My recently departed father always told me that the biggest corrupter in business was friendship. He didn’t mean criminal corruption, necessarily, but the milder sort of corruption that causes us to bend rules, look the other way, or to promote I or hire above a person’s qualifications. Most businessmen who would never dream of taking a cash bribe would almost immediately agree to do a favor for an old friend.”
I’ve followed Jonah Goldberg since the 90s, when NRO was only a handful of articles a week, and he really is very bright and very original. I’m sure he turns out bad articles regularly (everybody does), but he has a very interesting ability to be half a step ahead of conventional wisdom. I know that people sometimes talk as if he were a totally nepotistic hire, but the truth is that in the beginning, back in the late 90s, there really was almost no NRO to speak of, and NRO was naturally regarded as being a sort of appendage to NR-in-print. Nowadays, it’s quite the opposite, so it’s hard to remember how totally insignificant magazine websites used to be. I don’t know what the interior workings of NR and NRO are, but as a long-time reader, I can say confidently that Goldberg wasn’t handed a big, going concern on a silver platter.
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I find it SUPER AMUSING to listen to those on the left here and elsewhere lament that “but of course” a truely “professional” journalist need not necessarily be a conservative in order to report on conservatives while at the same time for YEARS have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the meme that all newsrooms should reflect the community they report on and thus most maj. metro news organizations should be majority black or have a heavy black/minority representation at the very least, as only blacks/minorities have the requisite “sensitivity”/”awareness” to accurately report on and gain the confidence of the black/minority community.
Of course, seen in this light, States which have almost ZERO black populations (in terms of a % of the pop as a whole) like Idaho, Montana, Iowa, Utah, Wyoming, Maine, Minn., and the Dakotas, etc., should also have ZERO minority representation in front of TV news cameras and in the news-rooms, n’cest pas? But when confronted with this logic minorities IMMEDIATELY shift ground and speak/argue for “merit” hiring practices for those demographic areas. The left and minorities want to have it both ways. Minorities hold themselves out as perfectly capable of reporting on all things white (“don’t pigeon-hole me, bro”) while simultaneously denying that whites are capable of understanding/reporting on their own. And the left in general sees conservatives too stupid to report on/analyze liberal thoughts.
It’s all a one-way street with the left and minorities. The stench of hipocracy is sickening enough to make even a Jackal wretch. To all those leftist “intellectuals”: Don’t even purse your lips or enter a keyboard stroke to talk to me on this subject until you will agree that white, suburban reporters can report as accurately and fairly about the goings-on in South-Central LA, Harlem, New Orleans’ Ninth Ward or inner-city Camden, N.J. & Chicago as minorities can report about down-state Illinois.
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PS: I should have added: Because the unerring logic of those who say that one need not be a conservative to report on conservatives means that the arguments advanced by minorities for greater representation in the news media as ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for accurate coverage of minority communities are nothing but self-serving esoteric BS.
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I’ve followed Jonah Goldberg since the 90s,
I only came across him after 9/11, during my first “Not reading the NYT phase.*” His was certainly better written than 90% of the rest of the on-line only content that I came across.
*The phase that started because I got sick of being reminded that in the 13th century, Islam was teh science and teh tolerance. Then I had my “Frank Rich” stopping the NYT phase. I’m currently in my “Uggh, hipster asses again” stopping the NYT phase.
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Only conservative reporters can interview conservative politicians? We’re really in strange territory here.
If I wanted a dispassionate analysis of the life and influence of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, I wouldn’t look to the head of a born-again Christian right-to-life group to deliver it. It’s the power of the internet. There is no longer a dividing line between one’s private opinions and one’s public persona. It’s like that old saying, “two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” Email communications are not secret, even if everyone thinks they are. Sharing inflammatory opinions with 400 others is a dangerous thing to do, particularly if you are part of a profession which likes to believe the public thinks it’s impartial.
I would argue that the problems of the contemporary media arise because the public no longer believes that the news media are impartial. It’s like the old Hollywood stars. They were much more glamorous, because the studios could manage their public image. Today, a wild party or ill-advised love affair will not remain secret. Everything you do or say, or have said, is a matter of public record.
It would be better for the news media to drop the illusion of impartiality, as no one believes in it. Come out, and accept the organization’s identity, rather like the newspapers of old, i.e., the Small Town Republican or the Small Town Democrat.
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FYI: It’s Jonathan Chiat. (Not Cheit.)
I’m just saying. 🙂
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And it’s Chait, not Chiat. 😉 Funny that I made that mistake in print. His name always reminds me of a Cheit.
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I spent a lot of time thinking about this topic over the weekend. Some bullets:
– Why was the WaPo surprised that Weigel wasn’t a conservative? If they wanted to hire a conservative blogger, didn’t this question come up in the interview? Did Weigel misrepresent his political views or did the morph over time?
– Who outed him?
– Blogging is bad for your career. I’m on twitter, facebook, and have a blog. I say stupid things all the time. That’s what happens when you are under pressure to write quickly without an editor. I don’t think that I’ve ever used the word “ratfuck,” but I’ve used other salty language to describe political figures. Worrisome.
Blogging is ultimately opinion writing. However, there are plenty of careers where opinions have to be kept in close wraps.
– Apparently, conservatives have been annoyed at this guy for a while. His articles had an anthropological tone: “Let’s observe these strange people at the Palin rally.” I get it. I would love to know why someone goes to a Palin rally. But conservatives were already getting ticked off at him and that undermined his job.
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“why someone goes to a Palin rally”
Not a hard question. People go to a Palin rally as an expression of cultural affinity. It’s the same reason they go to a speech by Al Gore. There isn’t any intrinsic reason to go to a speech by someone with a marginal education and minimal practical experience, so you go to make a public statement that you are one of These People and not one of Those People.
I personally am not likely to go to either such event, but I certainly think of myself much more as patriotic, churchgoing, and married than as educated, enlightened or modern, so you can see which one I would go to, if I went.
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