And the Post accepts. A sad day for journalism. Ben Smith claims Dave is a liberal. Not from where I sit. He's a sane libertarian, which means he understood just how completely nuts the conservative movement and Republican party now are. But Ben is right about this:
There's no sign the Post really thought this through. Even as old-timers rankled at the new hires, the paper -- scrambling for relevance on the Internet -- seems not to have considered what the buzzy personnel moves would mean for the paper's longstanding principles of detachment and neutrality in reporting.
One thing nobody argues is that publications should misrepresent and misidentify their own reporters. The Post set Weigel up for a fall, and themselves for embarrassment, and that's what they got today.
Goldblog relays anonymous gripes from the old WaPo guard - on Weigel's apparent "lack of toilet training", on his behaving "like an idiot", on the awfulness of "untrained kids" like Ezra Klein, and on the appalling idea that bloggers call themselves reporters. Goldblog remains, however, a believer in the value of "temperance in the expression of personal views."
There is a war going on within American journalism. All I can say is that I have learned more from Dave Weigel's brilliant, obsessive, accurate and first-hand reporting - yes, old-fashioned, grass-roots reporting - on the conservative movement than I ever have from the pompous dinosaur "journalists" at the WaPo.