Its really amazing how little the progressive mainstream media really understands. In yesterday’s NY Times, media reporter Jeremy Peters issued a warning to young journalists in a front page article “Covering 2012, Youths on the Bus” The warning?  There are partisan bloggers out there who are out to embarrass mainstream journalists. By partisan bloggers Peters means conservative bloggers, because to the NY Times a liberal bias is the definition of fair coverage.

CNN fired Octavia Nasr, its senior editor for Middle East affairs, after she composed a 19-word Twitter message expressing sadness after the death of a Hezbollah leader.

Were David Weigel in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963, no doubt he would have been pointing at the grassy knoll.

Given that a prank call between a pseudo-journalist and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker destroys the Leftist myth that Walker carries water for the Kochs – apparently, he doesn’t even know them, or he would have known the caller wasn’t David Koch - Weigel ignores facts from a quote he uses to contrive a new conspiracy theory.

Did Scott Walker Reveal His Crisis-Ending Ruse to a Prank Caller?

I think Murphy gets a scoop here when he gets Walker to explain a ruse that could bring the Senate back in session. He’s discussing the missing Senate Democrats.

Walker’s alleged ruse, or grand conspiracy, hangs on this bit that Weigel partially puts in bold. In reality, Walker is saying privately the very thing he has been saying publicly all along. It’s what Weigel also quoted, but then ignored, that tells the whole story.

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In a truly bizarre segment on MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews seemed genuinely perturbed at MSNBC Analyst David Weigel because Weigel chuckle ironically during his interview. First Matthews frames the discussion with outlandishly false claims that Newt Gingrich referred to the President as a “zombie” and compared Gingrich’s rhetoric to “pagan rites.” Then when Weigel wasn’t outraged enough, Matthews jumped all over him like an angry parent.

More from Dinesh D’Souza at Forbes: “How Obama Thinks.”

The David Weigel saga continues to stagger on, becoming ever more intellectually incoherent. Not only has Weigel written yet another story about himself, this time for Esquire, but Ezra Klein of the Washington Post — the man who recommended Weigel for his short-lived job there — has also come out with another piece, largely argued along juvenile tu quoque lines that wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year logic class. If Weigel and Klein are the best young talent the Post can find, then things are even worse with MSM journalism than we thought.

More seriously, over the holiday, both the Washington Post, in the form of its ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, and the New York Times, in the person of media critic David Carr, both weighed in, with the result that the line between real journalism — in the form of straight reporting — and opinion journalism is now more blurred than ever. If ever readers deserved clarity on this increasingly important issue it’s now, and yet both establishment papers just fell on their faces.

Why? Because they don’t know what to say. Instead, these apologists manage to pretzel themselves in contortions worthy of the Cirque du Soleil while trying to explain to their readers the fine distinctions, the nuances, between a reporter acting as a reporter and a reporter acting as purveyor of opinion, i.e. either bien-pensant leftist conventional wisdom or the youthful exuberance that attends the re-invention of the wheel.

Let’s start with Alexander: (more…)

I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.

Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the “N-Word” was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the “Obamacare” vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough. (more…)

It’s hard to respect a “journalist” who repeatedly insulted and mocked leading conservatives he was assigned cover, and even wished death on some of them, to a secretive email list comprised of liberal media figures around the country.  Whatever this says about Weigel’s political orientation, it speaks loudly and clearly to the fact that he was an unprofessional jerk, and that’s putting it kindly.

Weigel has mostly owned up to this fact, which I think says something positive about his character.

But as long as Weigel is airing more of his “Journolist” laundry, perhaps it should be pointed out that at one point in time Weigel aired this same kind of vitriol against leading liberal figures.

For example, do you think Dave still thinks Paul Krugman is “obviously insane”, “simple-minded” and a “cancer on the Times”? Does he still think that Krugman’s column is a “litany of propaganda, lies, and insults”?

Does he still think that Maureen Dowd “sucks” and that her work is “absolute tripe”? Does he still wonder: “why is this woman employed”?

Because I sure do (all of the above), but then I do not have a professional need to ingratiate myself with the liberal media establishment. (more…)

It’s always disheartening to see someone from your own camp take a bad hit as Dave Weigel has.  The Washington Post blogger, who was hired to provide coverage “inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party,”resigned over recently leaked emails from the Journolist listserv, in which he used some less than flattering language in his personal commentary about many of the people he was covering.

While I’ve always been respectful of Weigel’s insights and his writing, I would be being less than honest however if I’d said there wasn’t something about his posts that I’d also found worrisome.  The revelation of the Journolist emails only strengthened my gut feeling, especially when I saw how nasty the rhetoric was in the emails.  Frankly, that part surprised even me.

It’s not that I wasn’t open-minded to the views that Weigel has always presented; I could appreciate that he has criticisms of the right.  But as someone assigned to provide conservative insight, his commentary sometimes struck me as being penned more from a liberal viewpoint than that of a conservative or libertarian one.  It almost seemed more targeted to pleasing Media Matters’ readers.  And since I already follow a number of liberal journalists to balance out the material I read from conservative and libertarian leaning authors, Media Matters’ tone isn’t exactly what I’m usually looking for.  But perhaps there was a reason his posts sometimes seemed that way to me. (more…)

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)

This week, we saw partisan Washington Post blogger David Weigel resign for getting caught showing his private but unabashed disdain for conservatives.  Weigel, who was hired by Post editors for his perceived thoughtful analysis of the issues, was actually a conservative hater and liberal lover in scribe’s clothing.  But were we really surprised?  It happens every day.

It’s happened again with Gail Collins of the New York Times.  But the difference between Weigel and Collins is that the Times celebrates her.  Since there are so few conservatives who read the Times anymore, except in self-defense, I thought I would remind them why we decided to stop buying it.

This morning I stumbled on a Times piece when a friend posted it on Facebook.  The title alone caught my attention because it was so unbelievable, “The Age of Nancy.” Writer Collins wrote an unabashed anthem to Nancy Pelosi that was filled with talking points straight from Nancy’s staff –

Let us sing a song about the wonderfulness of Nancy Pelosi.

What a run she’s been on. This week — with the big financial reform package edging toward completion, and the House approving a major campaign finance reform bill — was a reminder of what an incredibly productive speaker she’s become.

The piece actually made me laugh out loud because it was so emotional and partisan. Collins employs outdated metaphors and demonstrates that she’s not only a devoted and obsessive fan of the Speaker of the House, but also a profoundly uninteresting and unoriginal writer.  It’s brazen public relations spin from the Times and another example of their blatant advocacy for their favorite causes and politicians. (more…)

Washington Post writer David Weigel has resigned his job reporting on the conservative movement and the Republican Party and the newspaper is well rid of him. Having only been hired in the spring of 2010, it took little time for this ill-trained scribe to demonstrate his lack of suitability for engaging in journalism at the major league level.

Weigel was found to have penned a substantial number of emails on a list serve that included disparaging comments about many of the people he covered during the course of his job. It was actually sort of cute reading his apology in which he sought to insulate himself, however thinly, by noting in the opening sentence that it was an off-the-record list serve from which his offending missives were pulled. How precious. No doubt he would give similar quarter to any source claiming off-the-record status.

In many circles, this demonstration of poor judgment alone would have been sufficient to dismiss a reporter but the Post is not well rid of him because of his politics or his opinions. It is because, though the public airing of his personal comments and attitudes, he has made himself a poster child for how to lose a libel suit. (more…)

The Washington Post’s David Weigel has resigned in the wake of a series of leaked emails, in which the blogger disparaged various figures in the conservative movement he was “covering” in his official capacity as the Post’s point man on the right. His resignation came less than a day after he posted this apology on the Post’s website:

I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list that day — quotes that I’m told a gossip Web site will post today. I apologize for much of what I wrote, and apologize to readers.

There follows some choice Weigelisms:

• “This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”
• “Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”
• “I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.” (more…)

Yes, we here at Big Journalism know there’s an infinite number of “what-if-the-shoe-were-on-the-other-foot” stories when it comes to the MSM. Any story that can redound to a conservative’s discredit will be hyped to the skies:

Anything that puts a Democrat in a bad light — especially if it’s even remotely a judgment call — will be buried:

So it’s no surprise that the Washington Post — the cheerleader for the hometown team, congressional Democrats — basically buried the disgraceful behavior of Rep. Bob Etheridge. From NRO’s Jim Geraghty: (more…)

You know you’re having a bad day, Joan Walsh, when it’s just you and Max Blumenthal alone in a foxhole while you’re being overwhelmed by the truth. Because David Weigel, one of your sources for Blumenthal’s story and Max’s own blog posts that James O’Keefe once helped organize a “racist conference,”  has now “clarified” his remarks and guess what?  Your story just fell apart.  Read it and weep:

Clarification — and Mea Culpa — on James O’Keefe and ‘Race and Conservatism’

On Wednesday, I wrote a post reacting to Max Blumenthal’s story “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” and was too quick with a description of the August 30, 2006 Robert Taft Club event on “race and conservatism.” Specifically, I wrote this:

“A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature.”

In a later post, I walked this back: While I’d been at the event, it was Isis, a photographer/investigator for the One People’s Project, who told me that her photo was actually a picture of O’Keefe at a table of controversial literature. But several e-mailers and commenters have pointed out that my first post appeared to endorse Blumenthal’s whole story. I want to quickly walk through that story and point out the parts that, based on my experience at the event and interviews with Isis and event organizer Marcus Epstein, were not true.

There follows five points of material error in Blumenthal’s story and in the original post at the “anti-racist” website, One People’ s Project (whose site is adorned with the old Soviet Union colors of red and gold, and features a Soviet-style logo).   Among the revelations: (more…)

Yesterday the Village Voice published a piece “OPP: James O’Keefe, ACORN and Landrieu Stinger, Ran Racist Forum” which they erroneously claimed that James O’Keefe “organized a speaking forum for white supremacists.”  This Village Voice released this update this afternoon:

James O’Keefe and Race: An Update

The Washington Independent’s David Weigel has added some clarity to the story of James O’Keefe’s role at a 2006 “Race and Conservatism” event in D.C. that featured the controversial Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine, as a participant.

In a previous post, “OPP: James O’Keefe, ACORN and Landrieu Stinger, Ran Racist Forum,” the Voice mischaracterized the event, saying that O’Keefe “ran” and had “organized” what we called “a racist forum.”

We also cited a Salon story by Max Blumenthal, “James O’Keefe’s race problem,” that talked about O’Keefe’s staffing a table that was “filled with tracts from the white supremacist right.” We mischaracterized the role in the event of the Leadership Institute (O’Keefe’s employer at the time).

Weigel, who says he attended the event, points out in a post this afternoon that it was “a debate, not a forum for Taylor.” (more…)

In Max Blumenthal’s article “James O’Keefe’s race problem” for Salon.com of February 3, 2010, Mr. Blumenthal makes a number of unverifiable and provably false claims regarding James O’Keefe’s attendance at a 2006 conference called “Race and Conservatism.”  Below are the list of quotes containing misinformation and an explanation of why they need to be addressed by the editors of your publication.

From left: Marcus Epstein, Jared Taylor, Kevin Martin, and John Derbyshire at what Max Blumenthal dubbed “a white-nationalist confab”

We kindly request corrections to all:

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism.

As noted in this post here by Larry O’Connor, we contacted Mr. Jenkins, who identified David Weigel as his source for the claim that Mr. O’Keefe was manning the table.  Mr. Weigel has denied that Mr. O’Keefe manned the table and has no knowledge to suggest Mr. O’Keefe was involved in the orchestration of the event at any level. In an interview with BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe denied having planned the event.

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David Weigel at the Washington Independent interviewed Marcus Epstein, organizer of the “Race and Conservatism” event that has been labeled as a “Racist Forum.”  He flatly denies allegations that have been made that James O’Keefe worked at the event or had any involvement in the event:

“I’ve made mistakes, which I paid for and addressed,” said Epstein, who has mostly ceased political activity since the 2009 revelation of his arrest in Georgetown. “I don’t want them to be used in false, guilt-by-association smears against others. I met James O’Keefe a number of times. It’s the Beltway — it’s a small circle. It’s the conservative movement. But he did not collaborate with me, definitely not on that event.”

Marcus Epstein

Weigel was also at the event in question, and he confirms that the characterization currently being made that it was a racist rally or forum is misleading and false: (more…)

It started with a blog post at something called One People’s Project, in which someone named Daryle Jenkins claimed:

(In 2006) ..there was this white supremacist forum that we had called attention to and eventually attended that featured American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and National Review’s homophobe extraordinaire John Derbyshire. It was originally supposed to be held at the building of the conservative activist organization Leadership Institute until it was forced to move to another location…..

There was also a photographer there, and lo and behold this picture has surfaced of a now familiar face attending the forum - James O’Keefe.

O’Keefe was manning a table at a forum of suit-and-tie Nazis.

A DC area photographer snapped a photo of O’Keefe as he maintained a literature table near the panelists.

The photograph that One People’s Project shows as its proof (above) is cropped and just shows O’Keefe from the shoulders up.  It doesn’t show that he is sitting at all, let alone at a table, let alone “manning” the table at the event apparently hosted by the Robert Taft Club.

Max Blumenthal — son of Clinton apparatchik “Sid Vicious” Blumenthal — at Salon.com picked up on the story and extrapolated even more: (more…)