By Warren Henry
Friday, August 10, 2018
On election night in Michigan, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel engaged in an unintentionally
hilarious bit of fluffery for gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed:
In reality, we will likely never see him win, let alone
in a statewide contest. Weigel’s sycophancy for a left-wing loser is not the
sort of opinion that used to land him in professional trouble. But his career
arc is a window on this moment in American journalism and politics.
Weigel made a name for himself at Reason magazine with a 2008 article about Rep. Ron Paul’s
publication of newsletters with racist and conspiracy theorist content. The
attention prompted follow-ups on Paul’s promotion of the John Birch Society,
the white supremacists around his campaign, and some of his supporters’
attraction to birtherism.
Given Paul’s presidential campaign, this angle was
newsworthy, particularly for Reason’s libertarian readers. It was also a lesson
for Weigel in the appeal of covering the Right’s fringe elements.
Weigel parted ways with Reason after the 2008 election because he “wasn’t fully on board
with the magazine’s upcoming, wonky focus on picking apart the [Obama]
administration.” Editor Matt Welch later wrote: “What [Weigel] wanted to write
about, and what we needed him to write about, were two different things.”
What Weigel wanted to write about was right-wing kooks,
which he made his beat at the lefty Washington
Independent from late 2008 through early 2010. Weigel believed the media
did not sufficiently portray the Tea Party as riddled with fringe elements,
even while admitting the movement’s leaders generally opposed the fringe. His
coverage of people like Tom Tancredo and Joseph Farah and continuing
fascination with birther attorney Orly Taitz ignored Tea Party supporters’ disinterest
and opposition. Even the left-wing New York
Review of Books offered fairer reporting.
Nevertheless, Weigel’s shtick was popular with the
center-left. Weigel joined the Washington
Post in March 2010. He spun himself as sympathetic to the conservative
movement and hostile only to its fringe.
Here, Dave Weigel
Was Free to Skewer the Right
The true breadth of Weigel’s hostility quickly became
apparent. In May, he apologized for calling same-sex marriage opponents
“bigots” on social media, in violation of the Post’s policies. In glorious Weigel fashion, his apology argued
that same-sex marriage opponents made less sense than birthers.
Weigel “resigned” from the Post that June, after media outlets published messages from
JournoList, an email group for liberal journalists. The coverage highlighted
Weigel’s incendiary comment that “This would be a vastly better world to live
in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly,
and set himself on fire.”
Other messages revealed Weigel’s desire to shape coverage
and de-platform various conservatives. Weigel partially sold himself as a
former Ron Paul voter, but privately ranted about “screaming Ron Paul fanatics”
and the “Paultard Tea Party people” on Fox News. He also urged his colleagues
(among other things) to avoid linking to the conservative Washington Examiner,
and to black out former veep nominee Sarah Palin’s claim that Obamacare
legislation included “death panels” that would ration treatment, even if the
coverage was negative.
Weigel quickly landed gigs with MSNBC and Slate (also
owned by the Washington Post, because
elite journalism is a smaller world than Disney ever imagined). His formula
remained the same: compare Ben Domenech on Ted Cruz’s Jacksonian foreign policy
speech at a 2014 event with Weigel’s account of the event as a hive of
right-wing nuttery.
In September 2014, Weigel jumped to Bloomberg, but
rejoined the Post mere months later.
There, he was forced to apologize again, this time for a false claim about the
Trump campaign from his Twitter account. Since the 2016 election, he has tended
toward more mundane, friendly reporting on Democratic politics.
Weigel and his defenders might claim his career should be
hailed as anticipating the Trump era. Yet Weigel’s private theory is that
fringe characters and issues should be suppressed because even critical coverage
fuels them. By Weigel’s theory, hyping nutters was good for Dave Weigel, but
less so for our politics. It is like the belief that billions in free media
coverage for Trump was bad for America, but good for CBS, writ small.
Curiously, the
Shoe Never Goes On the Other Foot
Conversely, Big Media has no left-wing nut beat. It was
not a major story when most Democrats said they believed President George W.
Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks. When President Barack Obama
named Van Jones, who had helped organize one of the first truther groups, to be
a “czar,” the media did not frame it as the elevation of a nutter. Indeed,
Weigel saw opposition to Jones as evidence of racism.
When progressive leaders and tens of congressional
Democrats maintain political ties to a racist conspiracy theorist like Louis
Farrakhan, Big Media covers it as an obligatory chore rather than a broader
phenomenon. Today, The New York Times
can name someone with years of anti-white tweets to its editorial board with
broad support in the profession.
More than one-third of Democrats, including figures like
Howard Dean and Robert Kennedy Jr., fueled the theory that Bush supporters
committed significant voter fraud to win the 2004 election. Today, journalists
and politicos sloppily claim Russia hacked the 2016 election, despite a lack of
evidence that vote counts were affected. Yet at no time does Big Media treat
left-wing nuttery as a political issue.
These are obvious examples of how elite journalism in
America decides what is extreme. For a more subtle example, consider a recent
Weigel story on Democrats embracing the idea of single-payer health care in
state politics. Weigel leads with a pitch from—wait for it—Abdul El-Sayed,
although Weigel had every reason to know El-Sayed had little chance against his
primary opponent Gretchen Whitmer, who considers such proposals “deceptive.”
Only patient readers learned that Colorado voters widely
rejected a single-payer proposal (paragraph 16). And that single-payer is
languishing in the state legislatures of New York (paragraph 19) and California
(paragraph 30). Then, after more blather from El-Sayed, that the drive for
single-payer failed in Vermont (paragraph 39). A progressive idea that
flounders in Vermont, California, and New York might be considered “extreme,”
but Weigel’s framing of the story seems designed to avoid that question.
As in the more obvious cases, the media generally shares
Weigel’s attitude toward the growing extremism within the Democratic Party.
Weigel just happens to be a case where that attitude is at its most ironic.
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