Immediately after the 2008 election, in the same pattern that the “objective” media used in 2004 to justify going hard left, and then admitting their biases immediately after the election in a slight mea culpa (before returning right back to it), the Washington Post’s then ombudswoman, Deborah Howell (now sadly deceased) wrote:
I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.
As I rhetorically asked after reading that, “So what are you doing to change such an obviously poisoned internal culture?”
Flash-forward to 2010, and now we know: the Post has ignored Howell’s advice and is doubling down hard left. The Politico reports, “Washington Post shifts leftward online:”
The once-cautious [Cautious? If you say so — Ed] Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence – through a combination of accident and design – into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times.
The Post’s foray into the new media world received some unfavorable attention last weekend when its latest hire, Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives, referred to gay marriage foes as “bigots.” [More on that here — Ed] But the resulting controversy brought into relief a larger shift: The Post now hosts three of the strongest liberal blogs on the Internet, and draws a disproportionate share of its traffic and buzz from them, a significant change for a traditional newspaper that has struggled to remake itself.
Besides Weigel, who came from the liberal Washington Independent, the Post also has Ezra Klein, hired last May from the American Prospect to bring his brand of deliberately wonky policy writing to its website; and Greg Sargent, who the paper said Tuesday will soon move to the Post itself after coming from TPM to run a political blog for the Post-owned website, WhoRunsGov.com, as well as two editors recently hired from the Huffington Post to handle online aggregation and social networking.
Curiously, the Politico left off that the Post also owns Newsweek and Slate, each also an equally leftwing presence online.
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