I think that you’re attempting to ignore the difference between reportage and opining.

If you can show the Weigel was advocating that stories not be reported, go right ahead and I’ll concede the point.

But that’s not what Weigel was about or has ever been about. He covers the story.

But suggesting that opinion pieces not focus on the more outrageous claims of some people, and by not repeating them, even if in refutation, not afford those claims greater publicity is nothing like your charge that he was calling for ignoring “news”.

Try to be serious, Karl.

Dear Karl, what exactly is the problem with encouraging people to refute things that aren’t true or anything else that the people on that list wished to discuss?

Did Weigel suggest anything beyond a couple of talking (or non-talking) points?

He wasn’t asking people to refute things that weren’t true. He was asking journalists to stop covering certain stories.

And do you seriously believe that a journalist should be suggesting partisan talking points to his or her colleagues?

If you are a journalist, you are interested in – for instance – how Brown’s defeat of Coakley impacts Democrat morale.

If you are a leftist activist you are interested in getting others to sell the story that Dem panic is overblown.

Funny…some of us believed for a long time that ‘climate science’ was being hijacked by a bunch of folks with an agenda, and when the Climategate email was released we were proven right.

We’ve suspected at least since the Obama campaign that a significant body of purported journalists had stepped over the line into coordinating a narrative supportive of the left agenda, and it’s looking more and more like that’s the case.

I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but we’ve now kicked over enough rocks that we ought to expect the rest have worms under them too. Heaven forbid we should ever see Hank Paulson’s email from, say, late 2008.

Karl hasn’t accepted, let alone been offered, a position at the Washington Post to cover the progressive movement as an “insider” on the pretext of providing ideological balance on behalf of the left wing against another equally conservative columnist’s gushingly sycophantic coverage of Republicans.

If, under the rather loose interpretation of journalistic ethics you seem to be proposing here, it is now deemed perfectly acceptable conduct for a mainstream newspaper reporter to actively conspire with other left-wing reporters in coordinating a group strategy to shape the national reportorial narrative in such a way that it helps advance the agenda of one political party to the detriment of another’s – specifically, to the detriment of the very party he was supposed to be covering rather than actively advocating against – then why did the Washington Post demand his resignation?

And if even the notoriously lax Washington Post has chosen to demand more rigorously ethical practices from its employees than the ones you are evidently quite comfortable defending, perhaps it might be a good time to engage in some thoughtful reflection on just how your own attitudes regarding acceptable professional conduct might have plummeted to such precariously abysmal depths?

Did Weigel suggest anything beyond a couple of talking (or non-talking) points?

Are you implying that Weigel was suggesting that reportage be non-factual or where his remarks aimed at bloggers of opinion such as yourself?

Did Weigel do anything that you wouldn’t do in discussion?

It’s been rather amusing listening to Weigel’s defenders complain bitterly that someone violated the off-the-record ground rules at JournoList in order to out him as a biased propagandist actively colluding with his fellow-traveling peers to advance the Democrats’ agenda & sabotage the Republicans’ .

From Neil Patel over at the Daily Caller we learn that it was hard to find Weigel’s fellow J-Listers who’d offer their defense on the record:

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.”

Which is quite an ironic defense there, given that Weigel himself had no problem betraying ‘pretty basic journalistic norms’ while relaying to other JournoList members the details of off the record interactions he’d had with some conservatives, who found out yesterday that Weigel had broken the confidentiality agreement he’d made with them in order to ridicule them with his fellow ethically-challenged ‘reporters’:

Meanwhile, key conservative anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform informed Weigel he would no longer be permitted to attend the group’s weekly off the record gathering of conservative activists. In e-mails revealed by The Daily Caller, Weigel told the roughly 400 members of Journolist what took place at one of ATR’s meetings.

I’m only going to say a few words specifically about his ignominious ouster from the paper today, coming on the heels of a vile smear campaign against him, culminating over the past 24-hours in the publication of a series of cherry-picked excerpts of private e-mails to an off-the-record mailing list.

For all their talk of tolerance and harmony, the movers and shakers of the left are viciously Machiavellian.

……no credibility what so ever.

WaPo blogger Dave Weigel resigned today

WaPo meeting today:

“Dave you either quit or we fire you. And Ezra you either dump your list or we fire you to as well. “

Its a propaganda machine Goebbels would be proud of.

Weigel got submarined by someone on or with access to JournoList, which was closed to conservatives.

Or someone with access to a member’s computer.

Wasn’t there another scandal like this with a mailing list that attempted to manipulate news coverage across the media? I think it was called Townhouse or something. This will pop up again under a different name with all the usual suspects on it.

Yeah, I read that Klein article earlier. I never said a Conservative or Republican outed Weigel. Obviously it was a fellow lib. My curiosity was piqued wondering why the emails were leaked. Did his liberal buddies dislike the subject Weigel covered or was it personal? We’ll probably never know. Unless someone writes a book.

conservative pilgrim on June 25, 2010 at 10:06 PM

Knowing how shallow, petty and self-absorbed these propagandists are, it probably arose out of a spat over drinks between Weigel and some fellow traveler at some cocktail party or other.

The rest, as they say, is history.

We know that Lefties are deceitful, willfully blind, and self-destructive.

What if YOU had only Lefties for “friends”??? Would YOU feel safe??? Would you EXPECT to be supported when things get difficult???

Someone said “Socialism fails when it runs out of other people’s money”.

Similarly, Leftist groups such as JournoList must fail when they run out of sufficient memory to remember all of their own falsehoods.

Jonah Goldberg reports at “The Corner” with a follow-up letter from a conservative under deep cover in the MSM:

onlineanalyst on June 25, 2010 at 9:40 PM

Conservatives having to be under “deep cover” says it all. I’ve heard it’s pretty much the same in Hollywood.

Link

Poor Dave Weigel – no longer at the Compost so he can tell us all how he hopes he fails.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery to VP Cheney.

[The Lone Platypus on June 25, 2010 at 9:59 PM]

It seems to me, then, that Klein mislead the people he was selling Weigel to at WaPo.

In other words, it’s 99.99999999% likely that Weigel was thrown under the bus by a fellow traveler.

[The Lone Platypus on June 25, 2010 at 9:42 PM]

That’s the most plausible explanation. On the other hand, I still have a shadow of a doubt about that. Weigel may not have been a true a lefty. I get the feeling Weigel is/was a shape-shifter. If that is more accurate, then he may have been ‘spotted’ at sometime elsewhere being a non-JL Weigel.

I forgot to add a line above. Ezra Klein has made it clear plenty of times, and just reiterated today, that only leftists and center-leftists were allowed on JournoList. Being even slightly center-right was grounds for rejection. Thus, the only way it could have been a “conservative” or “Republican” that leaked the emails is if you believe the list was hacked, and then the evil conservative decided only to go after Dave Weigel instead of trying to destroy any of the hundreds of other, far bigger names that have unquestionably posted things far nastier than Weigel ever did.

In other words, it’s 99.99999999% likely that Weigel was thrown under the bus by a fellow traveler.

The Lone Platypus on June 25, 2010 at 9:42 PM

Yeah, I read that Klein article earlier. I never said a Conservative or Republican outed Weigel. Obviously it was a fellow lib. My curiosity was piqued wondering why the emails were leaked. Did his liberal buddies dislike the subject Weigel covered or was it personal? We’ll probably never know. Unless someone writes a book.

I think Limbaugh’s montages of the MSM all using the same wording really sum that up better than anything else could. It’s sad that they still have an audience and any credibility. And that doesn’t even get to the nonsense of somebody like Steffi being “a journalist”. The MSM is just deplorable in every way.

clnurnberg on June 25, 2010 at 9:32 PM

As we’re supposed to believe it’s a coincidence. Brilliant minds think alike blah, blah, blah. Following Obama’s decision to cashier McCrystal and install Petreus, every single one of them used the word “brilliant.” Every. Single. One.

Uncanny./