by flory
Has the hiring and firing of a newspaper reporter ever received as much attention as Dave Weigel's truncated tenure at the WaPo? He should be glad BP is still fucking up by the numbers or he'd probably be leading the evening news.
And amongst the many hundreds of column inches so far written, I found this a rather strange paragraph:
But within the Washington Post, Weigel's politics (he is a libertarian with clear progressive leanings) appeared to surprise management, some of whom assumed he was a conservative. The ethos (or perhaps perception) of impartiality is still closely held in the Post newsroom. And with a recent slew of opinion/reporter hires (Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, and Weigel), some of the old guard felt uncomfortable.
The first sentence would seem to imply that he had a job because management thought he was a nice conserative boy. Then the second sentence goes on to tell us that the "ethos of impartiality" mandates that he lose his job because he was actually "a libertarian with clear progressive leanings."
So if I'm understanding this right, conservatives are naturally impartial; the rest of the world is pathetically biased and unfair.
Then the paragraph concludes with the "slew" of dirty fucking hippies -- all three of them, including Weigel the libertarian -- that are more than the righteous armada of conservative old white men (Will, Kraphammer, and 'The Dean') can withstand.