I wanted to avoid doing more than one post on the Dave Wiegel flap, but there’s just been too much news to ignore it.
Here’s Wiegel’s quasi-semi-demi apology. An excerpt:
“Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.”
Anytime someone issues one of these “I was being stupid and that wasn’t the real me” apologies, my automatic assumption is that they’re lying. They’re not sorry, they’re just sorry they got caught. Despite having, like Wiegel, contributed to Reason magazine, and despite Andrew Breitbart’s assertion that Wiegel was “outed” for being insufficiently left-wing, I see no particular reason to modify that assumption in Wiegel’s case.
The Washington Post still doesn’t get it. “The problem is that conservative views are the mainstream views–but not in Washington, D.C. or New York City or San Francisco. The problem is that only 20% of America self-identifies as liberal, so if the news organizations were politically correct and representative, they’d have 80% of their staff that is either moderate or conservative. Instead, 97% of journalists vote and filter their news through the liberal ideology.”
And what does admitting your naked bias against conservatives get you these days? Hired by MSNBC. I’m sure all 20 of MSNBC’s regular viewers will appreciate his insightful commentary.
Then again, they did beat CNN (but not CNN + Headline News) over the first six months of this year, which I think says more about how badly CNN is sucking than how well MSBNC is doing. And Fox News is basically slaughtering all of them in Prime Time.
I was going to say that if Wiegel really wanted us to trust him, he should put EVERYTHING in the JournoList archives up online. However, Andrew Breitbart has beaten me to the punch with his $100,000 offer for anyone willing to send him the complete archive. So I look forward to perusing the complete JournoList contents online later this week. Or better yet, watching Breitbart roll them out a few at a time over several months, letting the participants wonder how much of the archive he has, and who will be the next among them to be exposed, promises edification, amusement and a demonstration of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” for months to come. I think Breitbart could probably keep dribbling out tidbits well into, say, mid-October…
Updated: Iowahawk weighs in with his usual pith.