RSS Feed Menu
Writing on his personal blog, David Weigel notices that the Daily Caller has some discrepancies with the dates of some of the JournoList emails that are being posted:
Hmm. So the June 25 Daily Caller article about me, by Jonathan Strong, included this excerpt of an old JournoList e-mail:
In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”
Today, the Caller and Strong post that e-mail:I think Scherer is asking a question that Raines didn’t. But it’s a silly question anyway — sure, I think the republic will survive if I become editor of the Larouche World Bodily Fluid News and the WH refuses to grant me access for something. That Lester Kinsolving gets to sit in the WH briefing room demonstrates nothing so much as how useless that briefing room is.
The problem Raines diagnoses is less Fox News and more the biases that have been with the “MSM” for a while now — this need to give equal/extra time to “real American” views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up
So I ate dirt on this back in June and that second bit was a stupid thing to write, an example of me sucking up to the liberals on the list. (The first bit is wrong how, exactly?) But notice something — the first Caller story said I wrote this in “April,” i.e. the first month I worked at the Washington Post. The e-mail reveals I said this on March 12, before I joined the Post.I actually haven’t read every JList thread — I joined in January 2009 and my gmail tab reveals I have more than 4000 unread JList emails — but I wonder now about the veracity of what the Caller is publishing. As far as I can tell, no one is asking the website to back up its claims.
msmilack // Jul 21, 2010 at 4:06 pm
You are surprised about the wrong dates? The only difference I can see between Andrew Breibart and Tucker Carlson is a bow tie.
msmilack // Jul 21, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Forgive the presumptuousness of my next comment but I think you are mischaracterizing your own motivations by describing some of your comments as kissing up to the liberal media. In my case, although I am not a conservative, I admire David Frum and I love the Frum Forum on which I often comment and to which I sometimes contribute. Would I write differently if I were addressing Joan Walsh and her audience at Salon? Probably, but I wouldn’t call that kissing up in either direction.
In my opinion, you are flexible enough in your thinking to examine yourself from more than one angle; so give yourself a break. I am always surprised and a little confused when certain conservative writers or journalists (e.g. Levin) accuse other conservative journalists of kissing up to liberals. Why is it a bad thing to want to have friends and colleagues who disagree with you on policy? That should be a good thing, not a bad thing. I’m glad your opinions are not pre-ordained and predictable. It’s why people like to read what you write.
Xunzi Washington // Jul 21, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Interesting pushback on this “story” from Chait
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/76407/the-journolist-conspiracy-continues