Prez speaks, press jumps

From Best of The Web Today:

If you're not a Supreme Court justice, that doesn't mean Barack Obama doesn't want to tell you how to do your job. RealClearPolitics notes that in his speech yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the president lectured reporters that he expects more favorable coverage even than he's received:

"This bears on your reporting," President Obama said to journalists. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples' cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalency." 

"As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues. if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago . . . would've been considered squarely centrist positions," Obama said a few moments later.

Some journalists agree as The Atlantic Wire reports:

It's a message The Atlantic's James Fallows has been championing for awhile now and happily acknowledged in the president's remarks yesterday. "From the commanding heights of our government, the 'false equivalence' problem seems to be coming into view," Fallows wrote.

Hey, Fallows! C'mere! Fetch! Aww, good boy! What a cute little lapdog!

How to understand the press

Here's how to keep all that political news in perspective...

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times . They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated..

8. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

9. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is read by people who want only the score of the Cardinals game. They drink Budweiser, Budweiser, and wait a minute -- what was the question?

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. The Seattle Times is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in.

13. The Dallas Morning News is read because Texans need something to set their guns on when cleaning them.

(Thanks, Lainey)

Coincidence? You decide.

William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at Cornell Law School, raises an interesting point about the press and about George Stephanopoulos in particular. Stephanopoulos is an ABC correspondent and former communications director for Bill Clinton.

Remember when George Stephanopoulos, at the New Hampshire Republican debate on January 7, brought up and harped on whether the candidates thought states could ban contraception? 

Everyone, at least on our side of the aisle, shook their heads in disbelief as to why Stephanopoulos was bringing up the issue. There was no active controversy over contraception, it wasn’t in the news, and there were far more pressing political issues, yet what seemed like an eternity of debate time was devoted to the subject at the insistence of Stephanopoulos. 

It was, shall we say, something out of left field.

Watch the video.

It's pretty clear to me that Steph has an agenda.

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds. 

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

The Newt Gingrich speaks, and he seems to be aware of what's going on. Watch.

Our press at work

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
"(Removes words 'and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage,' paragraph 7; removes 'he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan' and instead states 'he did not pay down the balance of a $100,000-plus student loan,' paragraph 10; removes 'he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service Investigation' and instead states 'his name surfaced in an Internal Revenue Service investigation,' paragraph 12; removes 'voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee' and instead states 'opposed President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor,' paragraph 41; removes 'voted against Obama's healthcare overhaul' and instead states 'opposed Obama's healthcare overhaul,' paragraph 41)"--Reuters (corrections to a hit piece on Sen. Marco Rubio), Jan. 26

-- Best of The Web Today

What's on the Times' mind

The New York Times is often accused of being liberal. Do you think? Here's what it offered online today "above the fold," i.e., without scrolling:

CAMPAIGN STOPS
What’s Race Got to Do With It?
By LEE SIEGEL
Mitt Romney is ahead because he is the whitest white man to run for president in years.

EDITORIAL
What They Don’t Want to Talk About
Mitt Romney and the Republican Party fear talking about income inequality in the campaign.

One Percent, Many Variations
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF
The members of the 1 percent, such as Adam Katz, are diverse, especially in where they live, what they believe politically and just how rich they really are.

Boehner Faces Restive G.O.P. and White House Attacks
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
In the new session of Congresss, Speaker John A. Boehner’s challenge is not only to corral his party but also to keep its majority and fend off attacks by President Obama.

Theology Feeds Christian Unease With Romney
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Basic differences about Scripture and the nature of God leads many Christians to conclude that Mormons, including Mitt Romney, cannot be considered Christian.

A game the newspapers play

If it's a Democrat who screws up, it's hard to know it. From Instapundit:

A READER POINTS OUT ANOTHER CHANCE TO PLAY “NAME THAT PARTY!” New York Times: Ex-Governor Is Said to Be Focal Point of Inquiry. “Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico who ran for president in 2008, is being investigated by a federal grand jury for possible violations of campaign finance laws, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry.” 

If you scroll down far enough you see this: “Some experts likened the investigation of Mr. Richardson to that of John Edwards, another candidate in the 2008 Democratic race.” But that’s as close as they get to identifying Bill Richardson as a major Democrat and Clinton cabinet member.

For as long as I've been in journalism, journalists have self-identified themselves as liberal. This is one of the results/symptoms.

Great moments in accuracy-based journalism

From the New York Times website:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 22, 2011 

An earlier version misstated the tenure of Arthur Hays Sulzberger as publisher of The New York Times. It was from 1935 to 1961, not 1963. It also misstated how long Dr. Sulzberger and her sister, Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, served on the board of The Times. For Dr. Sulzberger, it was 26 years, from 1974 to 2000, not 28 years, from 1972 to 2000; for Ms. Holmberg, it was 37 years, not 30. 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 24, 2011 

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Wednesday about the physician and philanthropist Judith P. Sulzberger misstated the year she became a director of The New York Times. It was 1974, not 1972. (As correctly noted elsewhere in the obituary, she remained a director for 26 years.) The obituary also referred imprecisely to the Pasteur Foundation, on whose board she served. While it is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute in France, it is not the institute's "New York branch."

The late Dr. Sulzberger, as you might have guessed, was part of the family that controls the New York Times Co.!

-- Best of The Web Today

What people really care about

The most emailed articles at The New York Times this morning:

1. Well: How Meditation May Change the Brain
2. Concierge Medical Care With a Smaller Price Tag
3. Basics: Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch
4. Bush’s Daughter, in a Break, Endorses Gay Marriage
5. Mind: A Home Treatment Kit for Super Bowl Suffering
6. Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated
7. Government’s Dietary Advice: Eat Less
8. G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure
9. Practical Traveler: How to Fight Back When Your Flight Is Canceled
10. Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation

The Times' front page leads, of course, with Egypt, which is how it should be, but the readers' minds are elsewhere.

So you want to be a journalist

(Thanks, Ed)

Two papers in one!

From Best of The Web Today:

• "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."--New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009 

• "The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."--New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents, Nov. 29, 2010

Who will cover the news?

Clay Shirky has written extensively about the Internet since 1996. In addition to his consulting work, he is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. His thoughts on newspapers in the age of the Internet:

"Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

"I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."

(Thanks, Paul)

Is this the future of news?

Using Twitter as a source of news? Like the look of an old-fashioned newspaper? A Swiss startup called Small Rivers has taken that idea and turned it into a service called Paper.li. Here's how it works:

The site takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc., which it then analyzes using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to determine whether the stories are relevant. It then displays the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link.

The service also creates themed pages based on specific topics using hashtags, such as #privacy or #climate, in much the same way that newspapers create special sections around an event or topic. Paper.li also automatically creates topical sections like Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Photos, Politics and Business. If you hover over the source of each link or photo, you can reply, retweet, follow or unfollow and favorite that user. Users can also now create papers using a Twitter list.

You can see several of these here, courtesy of Gigaom:

• Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
• Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
• Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
• Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
• Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
• Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)

What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service, Mathew Ingram notes, is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.

The single best blog post ever

The public editor of The New York Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, starts a new blog with a post on superlatives. He discusses a news article about medical research that used the term "100 percent."

There's a red flag, Junior Editor Man!

My take is that danger awaits stories that venture into the land of 100% — or any other absolute, for that matter. Stories that report on something that is a “first,” a “biggest,” an “only”; stories that employ “never,” and stories that predict with absolute certainty are often headed for trouble. Yes, sometimes an absolute is absolutely right, but many, many times there is a crack of imperfection there.

Good point. There's only one bestest mostest of anything, as this blog proves, and you have to be sure you've got the real McCoy.

How people get quoted in the news

Reporters use quotes in news articles for various reasons. Sometimes the person being quoted expresses an idea in a clever way. When I was reporting for The Associated Press we used quotes as credibility: newspaper editors who didn't know us personally might relax if some knowledgeable person were quoted. So very often a quote went right into the second paragraph, or "graf" as we called it.

One of The AP's top writers saved his career with a quote. He wrote: "A nuclear missile was launched tonight in New Jersey." The career saver: the sentence ended with, "state police said." They said it. No matter it wasn't true.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses the matter of quotes in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Even if you don't report the news, you can learn something about how the sausage is made.

Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles. A New York Times story from the November 8 front page provides a good example here. It’s about how the crackdown on some Wall Street bonuses may have backfired. Executives were forced to take stock instead of cash, but then the stock went up, damn it.

This is an “enterprise” story—one the reporter or an editor came up with, not one dictated by events. And the reporter clearly views the information it contains as falling somewhere between ironic and appalling, which seems about right. But it’s not her job to have a view. In fact, it’s her job to not have a view. Even though it’s her story and her judgment, she must find someone else—an expert or an observer—to repeat and endorse her conclusion. These quotes then magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one. And so:

“People have to look at the sizable gains that have been made since stock and options were granted last year, and the fact is this was, in many ways, a windfall,” said Jesse M. Brill, the chairman of CompensationStandards.com, a trade publication. “This had nothing to do with people’s performance. These were granted at market lows.”

Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day. But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.

Of course this attempt to pass the hot potato to a total stranger doesn’t work, because before I can trust Jesse M. Brill about the thesis of the piece, I have to trust The New York Times that this Jesse M. Brill person is trustworthy, and the article under examination devotes many words to telling me who he is so that I will trust him. (By contrast, it tells me nothing about the reporter.) Why not cut out the middleman? The reason to trust this story, if you choose to do so, is that it is in The New York Times. What Jesse M. Brill may think adds nothing. Yet he is only one of several experts quoted throughout, basically telling the story all over again. 

Reporters have always done it that way. "Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles," says Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic.

Warning: blog post ahead!

A blogger at The Economist's Johnson blog -- R.L.G. are his initials -- quotes Tom Scott on the need for warning labels in journalism:

"The media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labeling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content." He supplies some rather useful cautionary flags, like "Warning: to ensure future interviews with the subject, important questions were not asked."

R.L.G. then tries his hand:

WARNING: The journalist writing this article, though adept with language, does not know nearly as much as he thinks he does about language, and does not know that he does not know this. He will pass on and over-interpret, with no critical faculties brought to bear whatsoever, the findings simplified in a press release about some recent linguistic research, simply because the press release has a university's name at the top. For best results, skip the article and the press release and go to the original research.

And then a warning on blog posts:

WARNING:  Written in minutes and fact-checked in seconds via Google. May contain unsafe levels of self-righteousness. Past cleverness is no guarantee of future results.

I would add: stolen shamelessly from someone else.

You be the editor

James Taranto, who writes the Best of The Web Today blog for The Wall Street Journal, points out the coverage of two presidents by The Associated Press. If you were the editor at The AP, what would you do?

Remember "accountability journalism"? As we noted in 2007, this was an Associated Press innovation designed "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make." It started in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, and was exemplified by stories like these:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

WASHINGTON (AP)--The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides. It's a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit.

Nearly five years later, we have a different president, facing a new crisis in the Gulf of Mexico after having promised in 2008 that his winning his party's nomination would be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." And how is the AP reporting whether he's keeping that promise? Here's a Saturday dispatch from the wire service's Ben Feller:

President Barack Obama keeps reassuring the nation that stopping the Gulf oil spill and limiting the fallout on the region are his top priority.

Yet so is protecting the country against attack. And getting people back to work.

Presidencies usually don't allow for a dominant priority--just a list of priorities. . . .

Like presidents before him, Obama is having to work through unforeseen problems: offshore drilling and an environmental disaster, mine safety, the earthquake in Haiti, piracy off the Somali coast. . . .

Obama's ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths.

He has tried to let everyone know that what's unfolding in the Gulf is more than a momentary crisis. The spill, he said Friday from Grand Isle, La., is nothing less than "an assault on our shores, on our people, on the regional economy, and on communities like this one."

The president is also fond of saying he will not rest until the problem at hand gets fixed. The trouble is that there's always more trouble.

I don't recall this kind of writing when I was working for The AP way back when. Then again, I have trouble remembering yesterday.

Taranto's point, of course, is that The AP has a political viewpoint. I think it does, which historically the wire service was not supposed to have, since it provided news to all manner of publications.

What bothers me more is that the last piece on Obama says nothing at all. "It's just words," as my editor at AP Newsfeatures once said of a less than stellar piece I turned in. It's just drivel.

OK, you're the editor. What do you think?

Why newspaper articles aren't news

Do you still read newspapers?

If you don't, it may be because there is too much verbal noise in the writing.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses this in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Things have changed since I was committing daily journalism at The Associated Press, but I recognize in what he says the artificial tone of newspaper writing.

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.”

You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one. 

There are a couple of explanations. One is that everything in a newspaper is old in Internet time: you've already seen it online or on TV, and so the paper thinks it needs to wrap the facts in "meaning." Another reason is that these highly-paid, well-educated national reporters feel that they are above mere fact-typers. They're smart enough to tell us how to think.

I suspect we've trained ourselves to tune this stuff out, as we tune out annoying ads.

JournoGate: all the news that fits our point of view

The big foo faw in the exciting world of journalism this week, is, of course, an online discussion group known as Journolist. Apparently it's been disbanded after a number of its emails were leaked, revealing -- you might want to sit down for this -- a liberal bent in what's known as the mainstream media, which, increasingly, has little in common with mainstream public opinion.

At any rate, the "journalists" in this esteemed group -- from places like The Washington Post and The New York Times -- were doing their best to get Obama elected in 2008. We've known for as long as I can remember that people in the media have a liberal bent; the surveys of their opinions and voting habits have told us.

What we haven't seen is a coordination so explicit and blatant. Here are some tidbits:

A member of the Obama campaign was in the pack and invited them to the White House after the election.

One member referred to Journolist as the "non-official campaign."

All hate Fox News and some suggested the government should shut it down.

The irony of that last one is fun -- a bunch of biased reporters accusing a network of bias. It's also scary: the impulse to use government power over people with whom they disagree. Of late people have been floating the idea of a government bailout of the mainstream media, which is losing advertising and audience.

The same thought emerged from the mouths of two blow-dried talking heads at CNN, who allowed as how maybe the government ought to regulate bloggers -- those with whom they disagree, of course.

The news in the news

Let's check in on the Fourth Estate to see what the ink-stained wretches are up to.

Seems The Washington Post is not just reporting but making news. Todd Zywicki at The Volock Conspiracy sums it up nicely:

The Washington Post’s Ombudsman Andrew Alexander dedicated his column this week to the Post’s puzzling silence on the DOJ’s dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case over the past several months.  Alexander rebukes the Post for its failure to cover the story, but seemingly accepts the explanation of the paper’s reporters and editors at face value that this reflected resource constraints, not ideological bias: “National Editor Kevin Merida, who termed the controversy “significant,” said he wished The Post had written about it sooner. The delay was a result of limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat, he said.”

But this explanation won’t wash.

Consider this substantial, prominently-placed puff piece that ran just one month ago (June 4, 2010) on page A3 of the Post that is entirely dedicated to the activities of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division: “Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division steps up enforcement.” I recall sitting at the breakfast table reading that piece and being absolutely stunned at its sycophantic tone and–most astonishingly–at the failure to even mention the controversial dismissal of the New Black Panthers case.  Not a single word.

I’m sorry, but Kevin Merida’s excuse simply does not add up.  I simply cannot see how the Post could assign a reporter (Jerry Markon) to write a substantial story–which reads like a press release for the new DOJ Civil Rights Division–and claim that its failure to even mention the New Black Panthers case until last week was the result of “limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat.”  And I think that Alexander’s uncritical whitewash of Merida’s excuse is, well, inexcusable.

Meanwhile, The Post did find time to unveil a massive report on the U.S. intelligence community. This naturally raised alarms, causing, for example, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which sent a memo to contractors warning them about the article. “Foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations and criminal elements will have potential interest in this kind of information. It is important that companies review their overall counterintelligence posture to ensure that it is appropriate.”

On the other hand, perhaps the newspaper is doing us a service in reporting that, "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

If this prevents our intelligence community from preventing another big one, then I'm concerned. Here are some highlights from the article:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

That's not good. Sounds as though a lot of dots aren't being connected.

The news in the news

Headlines on The Drudge Report:

WASHINGTON POST STAFFER: DRUDGE SHOULD SET HIMSELF ON FIRE...

Profanity-laced emails reveal POST reporter rooting for Dems...

BREAKING: Resigns...

An Unhappy Day At The Washington Post...

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic:

"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. 

And Jonah Goldberg at National Review:

The Washington Post has a very, very long history of hiring young writers from proudly liberal opinion magazines (as do many other mainstream media outlets). I stopped keeping count, but I’m sure at this very moment there at least a half dozen alumni of the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, or The American Prospect charged with writing ostensibly straight news or analysis for the paper. They might not have left the same paper (or listserv) trail, but does anyone doubt that Ezra Klein says similar stuff when he’s off-duty all the time?

I don’t know if Weigel needed to resign or not. The revelation of his comments certainly might hurt his ability to get conservative activists to talk to him. But the fact that he talks this way among his fellow liberal journalist friends shouldn’t be cause for him to lose his job at the Post. Because he’s hardly alone. Weigel’s real sin was getting caught.