Latest Mainstream Media Bias Scandal: WaPo Reporter Covering Conservatives Outed In Emails

Imagine the New York Times assigning a reporter to cover liberalism and the liberal agenda.  They pass this reporter off as being himself a liberal, but he’s really a plant.  He personally despises liberals and hates the liberal agenda, and is only on staff to sabotage the liberal movement by continually reporting a slanted picture of on only the worst aspects of liberalism.

Don’t worry, liberals.  You can stop hyperventilating.  Such a thing will never happen.  You don’t have to worry.  Every story you read will be doctrinally pure leftist propaganda.

But that is precisely what the mainstream media does to conservatives 60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and so on.

The leftwing bias and total lack of objectivity is simply unrelenting.

The perennially dishonest left have destroyed journalism.  It is dead.

Breaking: WaPo’s David Weigel Resigns After More Conservative-bashing Emails Disclosed
By Lachlan Markay
Fri, 06/25/2010

UPDATE | Lachlan Markay – 6/25, 3:00 PM: A roundup of reactions from all over the blogosphere and twitterverse below the fold. Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel resigned today after a host of offensive e-mails surfaced revealing his disdain for much of the right – the beat he was charged with covering. Fishbowl DC, which published a number of those emails yesterday, confirmed the resignation with the Post just after noon.

Yesterday I reported on leaked emails from Weigel to a listserve of liberal journalists bashing conservatives and conservatism – you know, the people Weigel is supposed to be covering. As bad as those email were, a plethora of messages from Weigel published in the Daily Caller take the conservative-bashing to a whole new level.

The new emails also demonstrated that yesterday’s quasi-apology from Weigel was really not as sincere as he claimed. He said that he made some of his most offensive remarks at the end of a bad day. But these new emails show that there was really nothing unique about them, and that offensive remarks about conservatives really were nothing new or uncommon.

Many of the misguided statements were clearly made in jest – “I hope he fails,” Weigel said of Rush Limbaugh after the radio host was hospitalized with chest pains, a reference to Limbaugh’s hope that Obama’s agenda would fail. But other bouts of name calling – ragging on the “outbursts of racism” from “amoral blowhard” Newt Gingrich, for instance – were obviously not jokes.

The Daily Caller revealed some quite stunning statements from the JournoList in its piece today:

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked,  “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”…

Republicans? “Ratf–king [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratf–k” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratf–king tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

Weigel continued to defend these outbursts, as he did when contacted by the Daily Caller. “My reporting, I think, stands for itself,” he said. “I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway… people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”

First, there’s the issue of whether anything said on a 400-member email list can really be considered “private.” “There’s no such thing as off-the-record with 400 people,” Nation columnist Eric Alterman told Politico.

But the real issues are, first, whether such mean-spirited jabs demonstrate a disdain for many conservatives that precludes Weigel from covering them fairly (he did label gay marriage opponents “bigots,” after all), and second, whether the Post feels it is appropriate to have someone hostile to the right covering conservatism, while a through-and-through liberal in Ezra Klein covers the left.

The Post signaled that it did not consider Weigel’s comments to be a serious problem. It seems that attitude has changed.

Managing Editor Raju Narisetti told Politico that “Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism.” He added that it was “time to move on.”

The Post declined comment on Weigel’s resignation.

*****UPDATE

Below is a roundup of reactions from prominent online commentators since Weigel’s resignation.

Politico’s Ben Smith paints Weigel as an unfortunate casualty of the collapsing facade of objectivity in the Post’s online efforts.

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he’s a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he’s liberal is primarily the Post’s fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper’s brass to put him in an unsustainable position.

Ed Morrissey seems to share this sentiment:

Having an anthropological study of conservatives, such as Dave provides, would work if the Post had a similar anthropological look at liberals from someone on the outside to balance it.  As it stands, however, Post readers get a Conservatives In The Mist approach that seems to predicate itself on the belief that they can’t figure conservatives and conservatism out for themselves.  That’s not a reflection on Dave, but a criticism of the editorial decision to pursue a one-sided strategy of critical analysis at the Post.

And indeed, one of the most interesting elements of the reaction to Weigel’s resignation seems to be the admission, or at least the acknowledgment, that he is, in fact, a liberal. The “libertarian” label seemed to stick.

But today,  Weigel’s liberalism was treated as a given. Even Keith Olbermann, on whose show Weigel is a regular guest, tweeted his agreement: “If the WaPost didn’t know @DaveWeigel  wasn’t a conservative blogger, it’s time for the Post to FOLD. My full support is yours, David.”

At the Atlantic, Jefferey Goldberg made that observation almost in passing. Goldberg went on to make what has been (somewhat surprisingly) a sparsely invoked argument in the hours since Weigel’s resignation: that the crudity of his comments itself was enough to sully his reporting.

Media consultant Josh Treviño claimed on Twitter that “nearly all journalists mock their subjects. Maybe not the ones covering elementary schools. But all the others.” But Goldberg disagrees:

“How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?” one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. “I’m not suggesting that many people on the paper don’t lean left, but there’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.”

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

Others, such as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor and National Review’s Jim Geraghty, attributed Weigel’s decline not so much to the language he used as to his style of reporting; his tenancy to seek out the fringe elements of the movement, and focus on them, rather than on mainstream conservatism.

As Gainor said in a statement today,

Weigel’s rapid meltdown showed the incredible danger for traditional media to play fast and loose mixing news and opinion. The Post was either unwilling or unable to find a neutral reporter to cover conservatives. Nor did it hire an actual advocate as it has done for the left with Ezra Klein. Instead, the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo. This disaster should be proof enough that their method was a failure.

Geraghty echoed Gainor’s comments in a blog post, saying

Dave only fits the loosest definition of conservative; I think he’s best defined as a left-leaning, idiosyncratic libertarian. He is also a political junkie with a voluminous appetite for news and a dogged reporter. From where I sit, he spends too much time writing about fringe figures and trends that are largely irrelevant to national politics (Orly Taitz, Birthers, etc.) but perhaps that’s his genuine fascination and/or what his employers wanted. Righties suspected Dave wanted to spotlight the freakiest and least appealing self-proclaimed “conservatives”; I suspect that at least part of Dave’s mentality was simply, “You have got to hear what this lunatic is saying.”

Journalism is a field that basically only hires liberals.  Like another liberal-dominated field – education – it basically maintains standards of ideological purity that rival the Nazi or Communist Parties in their worst days  of yore.  Journalism is dead in America, and liberals were the murderers.

Education is likewise dead.  Like the unions that destroyed every single other industry they touched, liberals have destroyed education – turning it into leftist indoctrination – just as liberals turned journalism into leftist propaganda.

You will never see a day in which half of all reporters, journalists, and op-ed writers are conservatives.  The status quo is hard-core liberalism; and the field of journalism will maintain that status quo at absolutely all costs – even as the liberal dinosaur media shrink into bankruptcy or laughably low ratings and readership.

Which means any scintilla of objectivity is a farce.

The most asinine thing of all is this notion that reporters – who are so overwhelmingly liberal it is absurd – somehow believe that they can think conservatives are not only stupid, but genuinely evil, while at the same time believing that liberals are both intelligent and virtuous, are somehow able to cover both sides fairly and objectively.

In that regard, journalists are so arrogant, and so transcendentally stupid, that it defies all rationality.

Obama The Leering Cad: Not The Return To The Clinton Era We’d Hoped For

Note: Important Update and Comment appears below.

To be filed under the category, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Democrats are going to say, “He’s not looking at her butt!  He’s looking at… well, he’s looking at something on the floor!!!”

And I say, “Not with that look on his face, he isn’t.  And don’t think Sarkozy doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, either.”

There are many Democrats who laud the Clinton era, and yearn for a return to that gilded age when the streets were paved with gold.

There are flaws with their memories, of course: a comparison between the Bush and Clinton years doesn’t make George Bush look bad at all; the Bush tax cuts, contrary to Democratic talking points, actually led to “the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history”; the Clinton budget surplus turns out to be a myth that really should be exposed as such once for all; and everything else aside, Clinton’s biggest successes as president came AFTER voters rejected disastrous Democrat rule in the Republican revolution of 1994.

But let’s agree: things were a whole heckuva lot better with Bill Clinton at the helm than they are now under Obama’s faulty steering.

That said, this is NOT the return to the Clinton years anybody was wanting.  If you really want to be more like Bill Clinton, Barry Hussein, PLEASE don’t be like Bill was with women.  ANYTHING BUT THAT.

I hope Michelle slaps you silly, Barry.  I hope you sleep on the lawn tonight.  I hope a few $6,000 purses don’t cut the mustard.

UPDATE: I have since seen the video, which I will post, that presents a very different “picture” as to what happened:

The still image seems to show a laser-beam focus on the girl’s rear end; the video shows what would amount to a quick glance in the course of helping another woman down a step.  To the extent that Obama is “leering,” it amounts to something in momentary passing.  Nothing to get worked up about.

For the record, I wouldn’t have run the story if I’d seen the video rather than the picture.

I don’t take down articles.  I have NEVER taken down an article.  Why not? Because that’s what the left does, all the time.  They run absolutely terrible stories (such as the Daily Kos story questioning whether Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with Trig because it was really Bristol Palin who was actually pregnant with a child fathered by Todd Palin), and when the facts come out disproving such an attack they simply delete it and move on like nothing happened.  There was never an apology, never a mention that they had participated in anything wrong.  Just nothing.

I don’t want to be like that.  I want to take responsibility.

Someone took a “still” of a video that – while itself unedited and therefore “true” – created a very different inference as to what actually transpired than the whole story (or video) would have provided in context.  This is what the left does all the time: they isolate one aspect of a story from the context and broadcast an artificial and propagandized view of reality.  And they rarely ever admit what they are doing.

Here’s a fact-checked example of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – not to mention most of the mainline media – doing almost exactly the same thing with statistics that someone did with that “Obama leering” video:

With growing violence on the U.S.-Mexico border fueled by powerful drug cartels, officials from both countries have been repeating a shocking statistic to suggest this isn’t just a Mexican problem.

“This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States . . . more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to Mexico on April 16, 2009. “So we have responsibilities as well.”

Obama joins many other U.S. and Mexican officials — from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the Mexican ambassador to the U.S. — who have cited versions of the 90 percent figure in arguing for greater U.S. intervention. For his part, Obama has pledged to commit more money and resources to stem the flow of guns south of the border.

But Obama, Clinton and others have left out important qualifiers when citing the 90 percent statistic, which originates from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency doesn’t have statistics for all weapons in Mexico, where gun sales are largely prohibited; the figure is based on only guns that the Mexican government sent to the ATF for tracing and that the ATF found were traceable.

Along those lines, the number was cited correctly by William Newell, an ATF special agent who oversees the bureau’s operations along border in Arizona and New Mexico, when he testified before a House subcommittee on March 24.

“In fact, 90 percent of the firearms recovered in Mexico, and which are then successfully traced, were determined to have originated from various sources within the continental U.S.”

Gun rights groups say the number has been widely and intentionally distorted to advance a gun control agenda.

And on April 2, 2009, Fox News ran a story on its Web site dismissing the statistic as a “myth.” The article cites statistics from the Mexican government that suggest only about a third of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico are submitted to the ATF for tracing; and it notes that many guns submitted to ATF cannot be traced. Therefore, the writers conclude, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the United States.

According to the article, “a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.” The article goes on to say many weapons are coming from a wide variety of foreign sources including China, South Korea, Spain and Israel, as well as from the Russian mafia and other nefarious sources in Asia, South and Central America.

“Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this,” National Rifle Association spokesman Chris Cox told Fox News. “The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment.”

ATF officials challenge the suggestion that Mexico only sends them guns they suspect are from the United States. In fact, the ATF found about a quarter of the 90 percent were made in other countries and then taken illegally from the United States into Mexico.

Here’s the Fox News story with the fuller array of facts.

What the mainstream media, and what President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, did with guns in Mexico is what largely passes for “news” today.  Half truths frequently amount to whole lies.  And we get carefully edited half truths that appear to tell a story supporting the liberal agenda as a matter of course today from our “journalists.”

Whenever you tell a story from one side, one “snippet,” you run the risk of bias.  And our drive-by media is filled with bias today.

I am doing something that the above media and persons have not done; I am presenting what amounts to a retraction, along with the full evidence so that people can come to their own conclusions.

So any liberal who wants to criticize me for this story, go ahead.  Just realize that even when I’m wrong, I’m STILL better than your people and your sources.