Two Journalists In One!

In the Politico today, Ben Smith quotes Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

“The way I explained Dave is that he’s the best reporter on the conservative movement beat,” Klein said, describing Weigel as “hard to characterize politically.”

“I have not heard him express many policy opinions,” he said.

In the Washington Post today, Ezra Klein writes “On Journolist, and Dave Weigel:”

At the beginning, I set two rules for the membership. The first was the easy one: No one who worked for the government in any capacity could join. The second was the hard one: The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left. I didn’t like that rule, but I thought it necessary: There would be no free conversation in a forum where people had clear incentives to embarrass each other. A bipartisan list would be a more formal debating society. Plus, as Liz Mair notes, there were plenty of conservative list servs, and I knew of military list servs, and health-care policy list servs, and feminist list servs. Most of these projects limited membership to facilitate a particular sort of conversation. It didn’t strike me as a big deal to follow their example.

Or as Moe Lane wrote in the post we linked to earlier today:

Nice of Ezra Klein to shaft his good buddy Dave Weigel on the way out by explicitly admitting that Klein wouldn’t let anybody on the Right onto JournoList in the first place, but that’s the Online Left for you.  You ain’t with them all the way, you ain’t worth nothing to them.

Think of it as Peace on Earth, or Purity of Essence, to rip a couple of strange but lovable phrases.

Meanwhile, Cuffy Meigs employs a vintage “Far Side” cartoon to illustrate the limits of the Post’s “Gorillas in the Mist” style of reporting on conservatism.

Related: “Julian Sanchez’ Metaphysical Anti-Realism.”

Update: More duality spotted here: “Journolist is done, only not really.”