Four questions for the Washington Post from Daily Caller publisher Neil Patel, including:
4) What do all the other so-called objective journalists who are members of JournoList have to say? How can they claim any loose association with the concepts of truth and fairness as they stood by and participated in this fraud?
Few members of JournoList have commented publicly on Weigel to date. One of the few who has anonymously defended him to POLITICO:
Whoever broke the confidentiality of the list obviously has no respect for some pretty basic journalistic norms. But I can’t talk about it because it’s supposed to be confidential. Whoever leaked that is obviously extremely jealous of the exceptional work that Dave is doing for the Post, and whatever Dave said should be viewed in that light.
Excuse me? The Washington Post holds out Weigel as their reporter of choice to cover conservatives and Republicans. Weigel spends all his time going to conservative and Republican events and claiming to be an objective reporter there to cover them fairly. In between these events Weigel goes online and vents on JournoList to 400 other journalists — many who claim to be of the “objective” variety — about just how much he hates those “ratfucker” (his word) conservatives and Republicans. All of the other journalists in the know about this fraud just sit tight and let the fraud continue. Are these the “basic journalistic norms” that those on JournoList are upholding? The reporters on JournoList owe their readers an explanation.
Read the whole thing.
Update: As the Washington Post continues its pattern of cheat and retreat, the Post’s Andrew Alexander plays the usual latter role as an MSM ombudsman:
Alas, it took only one listserv participant to bundle up Weigel’s archived comments and start leaking them outside the group. The result is that Weigel lost his job. But the bigger loss is The Post’s standing among conservatives.
I have no idea how much Alexander was smirking when he wrote that, because it can’t be sincere. It’s almost identical to what his predecessor wrote in November of 2008, after admitting that the Washington Post was — shocker! — in the tank for Obama:
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.
What, and risk being dubbed ratf***er for complaining?
Or as I rhetorically asked after reading that, “So what are you doing to change such an obviously poisoned internal culture?”
And now we know: hope they don’t get noticed doubling down on their hard left bias, and then bring out the ombudsman to once again put a Band-Aid on the tumor when caught.
Related: “The Oral Suicide Club: David Weigel Joins Helen Thomas, Van Jones, Michael Richards, Howard Dean.”
Update: Epistemic Closure — “The overlooked story from the Weigel kerfuffle.”
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