Friday, June 25, 2010

Pop Goes The Weigel


Per MediaBistro, Dave Weigel has resigned from the Washington Post.

Like Glenn, at first I thought this was an overreaction. I still don't think Weigel's obnoxious JournoList rants were a firing offense, although failing to disclose his membership in Ezra Klein's invitation-only Leftie club was a much more serious offense against Weigel's readership.

That said, I can understand why Weigel would leave at this point, and why the Post wouldn't argue with him. Prior to yesterday, Weigel could claim to be something other than just another hostile Leftie journalist thanks to his previous stint at Reason. Once the mask was ripped off, though, the odds that anybody to the right of David Gergen would take Weigel's calls dropped to somewhere around absolute zero. It'd be tough to maintain a blog ostensibly about the conservative movement when actual conservatives were liable to treat Weigel about the same way military officers will be treating Michael Hastings for the rest of his career--with cold silence.

Now, I don't think for a second the Post was ever remotely serious about honestly covering the Right in Weigel's blog or anywhere else, but maintaining the myth of Olympian objectivity is a sufficiently-potent cultural totem among "journalists" that they probably couldn't keep running Weigel with a straight face after today. Certainly no right-of-center blogger will ever link to or even reference Weigel without mentioning his JournoList scarlet letter. That'd make him quite popular among the Lefties, but for everybody else, he'd become an ignorable nonentity.

As for Weigel himself, while I still don't think he ought to have lost his job over this whole thing, I strongly suspect that his JournoList buddies (after conducting a vicious inquisition to find the identity of the heretic who leaked Weigel's rant) will find him a nice George-Soros-funded sinecure in very short order. From there, he can pick up right where he left off.

UPDATE: Weigel spotted at Huffington Post D.C. office. That sure didn't take long... the big news to me, though, is that the HuffPuff actually has an office.

Thanks to reader Patm for the heads-up.

5 comments:

  1. Wishing Drudge to die, for what? If not for the bias, the derangement was enough of a reason for him to "resign".

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  2. Seems your prediction was spot on. His friends found him a nice, Soros-funded gig at Huffpo. Peter principle. He fails upwards.

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  3. Yes, the fact that his calls wouldn't get returned has to be one issue. But the other ought to have been that he was spending so much time, on the Right Wing beat, hanging and schmoozing with the Left Wing. Weigel has schmoozed the Left, hung with libertarians, and reported on the Right's fringe, but the one thing he's apparently never done is actually spend serious time reporting on, and understanding, the part of the Right that shapes policy and has power and comes up with ideas that aren't crazy. He was a guy with very little interest in his actual subject, and that showed in the fact that no one writing about his firing has cited anything notable he wrote during his Post tenure-- that didn't have the word "ratf-----r" in it.

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  4. Why isn't it a resigning/firing offense to show himself incapable of doing/unwilling to do the job he was hired to do?

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  5. Tim, I think he was doing precisely the job he was hired for--to paint conservatives in the worst possible light. He didn't get run because he wasn't doing his job, but rather because he wasn't able to do so with a phony mask of objectivity any longer.

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