It was a speculative post, but as I conclude about Weigel, "Folks need to be careful about their allegiances."
So now it turns out that Weigel's gotten himself into a bit of a jam. He's a contributor to the left wing press collective, "JournoList" (founded by hard-lefty Ezra Klein), and some his own intemperate e-mails published there have been made public. The problem's not so much what he wrote, but where. As Will Collier points out:
Weigel's personality aside, the fact that he's a contributing member of Klein's liberal propaganda-coordination clique should have been disclosed from the very beginning of Weigel's "reporting" on conservatives. It says nothing good about either Weigel or his bosses at the WaPo that none of the above thought Weigel's membership in a glorified version of Media Matters would be something worth notifying readers about.I've given Weigel the benefit of the doubt in the past, largely because Robert Stacy McCain has vouched for him. But no more. If you're mostly hanging out with lefties (which is what a wrote about a year ago) you're mostly going to echo left-wing talking points. On occasion Weigel's bucked the stereotype, but I think this episode pretty much destroys what little credibility among those on the right who might otherwise have trusted him.
ADDED: I almost spoke too soon. If Wonkette's going to bat for Weigel ... well, the cat's really out of the bag.
I like seeing a blog controversy as much as the next guy, but really that's all this is - not that that's a bad thing (proprietors of the big political sites need their fun too). But for those of down at worm’s-eye level this didn’t even register. We’re not Charlie Brown, and we’ve stopped falling for “come on kick the football” line. So when the Post made a bid to get a little more readership with the “adding balance by having somebody write about conservatives” bit, most of us paid the same amount of attention we would to any carnival barker/used car salesman/late night infomercial pitchman.
ReplyDeleteWiegel is probably an okay guy, but his position is an explicit and patronizing Wapo offer of a card table in the basement while the adults eat upstairs – I don’t need or read him or the dying newspaper he works for.
I really don't care for the veneer of objectivity. Journalists should drop the facade and go for honesty.
ReplyDeleteWeigel shouldn’t apologize for being HONEST; he (and everyone else in the Democrat/Media Complex) should apologize for pretending to be OBJECTIVE.