My take on the Dave Weigel controversy and the Journolist listserve, written a few days ago for The American Conservative's blog:
Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for Journolist’s full archive, which he wants to make public. A furious Andrew Sullivan decries Breitbart’s efforts as attempted character assassination. But while this may perplex Sully, interest in the listserv isn’t centered around the private lives of Beltway journalists.
Few care when typical journalists hurl sophomoric insults at the right. (I doubt Sullivan will be criticized for calling them “moronic hounds.”) The case of Dave Weigel was interesting because many readers, as well as some management at The Washington Post, had assumed the “Right Now” blogger was a conservative. Weigel calls himself a libertarian. He has every right to do that, just as people who eat extra-crispy KFC drumsticks can call themselves vegetarians. But the leaked Weigel emails, replete with scathing criticism of conservatives and support for Obamacare, reveal clear and relevant liberal biases.
Sullivan argues that Breitbart would release the gossipy Journolist archives to “ransack private lives.” I’m skeptical as to how highly people who regularly aired their dirty laundry to 400 competing journalists value their privacy. And while it’s not important to know if a 20-something liberal journalist has a secret crush on Maureen Dowd (he wouldn’t have had a chance anyway), it is important to know if he has strong opinions about the issues and people he reports on.
Even the most honest journalist’s reporting will occasionally be colored by ideology. Still, many highly opinionated journalists make great reporters. Weigel, who covered the conservative movement for the Post, is one of them. Nevertheless, by obtaining and publishing Journolist’s archive, Andrew Breitbart would expose liberal media bias and cast a healthy skepticism upon supposedly objective reporting. If the biases of a journalist are public knowledge, she’ll be more conscious about not letting them affect her reporting.
Most importantly, exposing Journolist would bring the unfettered truth to the public. Super-exclusive listservs aside, isn’t that the point of journalism?
- Blog Policy
- Login or register to post comments
Connect with YAL
to the YAL channel on 
Upcoming Events
-
Info This seminar offers an introduction to the thoughts and thinkers of the...
-
Info The contrast between liberty and power in the history of the...
-
Info The summer’s final Freedom University boasts lectures on the hottest...
-
Info This is an all day, family-friendly convention for freedom-minded folks in...
-
Info Taking RSVP now for a June 30th - July 1st convention.We need to secure...
Unfortunately, immediately following the Weigel brouhaha the founder of Journolist decided to disband it and delete the archives, so I doubt there's even anything left to recover. From what I understand, it was a Google Group and wasn't stored locally on any one machine.
This is a great take on the subject of journalistic bias- I think there's no such thing as a truly objective reporter. The best we can hope for is that journalists are honest and admit their biases; it's the least we can expect out of a profession committed to telling the plain truth to people.
Weigel is a chameleon. He said he was a libertarian when he worked at Reason, a conservative when covering the right for the Post, and he appears to be a liberal when chatting to a group of liberals on this listserv. He changes his colors to fit his surroundings.
We'll see where Weigel ends up. Beltway scuttlebutt has it that he's been seen around the Huffington Post and MSNBC offices; if he ends up as a commentator at one of those fine journalistic institutions it wouldn't surprise me much.
Right on, V- and in addition to being dishonorable, sucking up to statists never works.
Though Klein deleted the listserve, I think there's a good chance at least one of its members hasn't deleted all those old messages from his inbox. :--]
Everybody says things in confidence that they wouldn't want shared in public. That plus the fact that these emails were taken out of contexts make these emails even more damning. For all we know, even more emails could have been sent that were very sympathetic to people on the right. Also, people like limbaugh, drudge, palin, and beck are derserving of criticisms. They have a tendancy to do rediculous, hypocritical things. They are part of the reason I am a libertarian and not a conservative. Do I agree with all of his criticisms, no. Is he a libertarian, probably not. But he was a good reporter. There are probably more people on that list who have personal biases but try very hard to keep that out of their work and this would just be used a weapon against them.